Following the color line
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Title: Following the color line
An account of Negro citizenship in the American democracy
Adapter: Ray Stannard Baker
Release date: January 4, 2011 [eBook #34847]
Language: English
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FOLLOWING THE COLOR LINE
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
OUR NEW PROSPERITY
SEEN IN GERMANY
BOYS' BOOK OF INVENTIONS
SECOND BOYS' BOOK OF INVENTIONS
AND MANY STORIES
[Illustration: AN OLD BLACK "MAMMY" WITH WHITE CHILD]
Following the Color Line
AN ACCOUNT OF NEGRO CITIZENSHIP
IN THE AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
By RAY STANNARD BAKER
_ILLUSTRATED_
New York
Doubleday, Page & Company
1908
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
COPYRIGHT, 1904, 1905, BY THE S. S. McCLURE COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1907, 1908, BY THE PHILLIPS PUBLISHING COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
PUBLISHED, OCTOBER, 1908
"I AM OBLIGED TO CONFESS THAT I DO NOT REGARD THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY AS
A MEANS OF PUTTING OFF THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE TWO RACES IN THE SOUTHERN
STATES."
--_De Tocqueville, "Democracy in America"_ (1835)
PREFACE
My purpose in writing this book has been to make a clear statement of the
exact present conditions and relationships of the Negro in American life.
I am not vain enough to imagine that I have seen all the truth, nor that I
have always placed the proper emphasis upon the facts that I here present.
Every investigator necessarily has his personal equation or point of view.
The best he can do is to set down the truth as he sees it, without bating
a jot or adding a tittle, and this I have done.
I have endeavoured to see every problem, not as a Northerner, nor as a
Southerner, but as an American. And I have looked at the Negro, not merely
as a menial, as he is commonly regarded in the South, nor as a curiosity,
as he is often seen in the North, but as a plain human being, animated
with his own hopes, depressed by his own fears, meeting his own problems
with failure or success.
I have accepted no statement of fact, however generally made, until I was
fully persuaded from my own personal investigation that what I heard was
really a fact and not a rumour.
Wherever I have ventured upon conclusions, I claim for them neither
infallibility nor originality. They are offered frankly as my own latest
and clearest thoughts upon the various subjects discussed. If any man can
give me better evidence for the error of my conclusions than I have for
the truth of them I am prepared to go with him, and gladly, as far as he
can prove his way. And I have offered my conclusions, not in a spirit of
controversy, nor in behalf of any party or section of the country, but in
the hope that, by inspiring a broader outlook, they may lead, finally, to
other conclusions more nearly approximating the truth than mine.
While these chapters were being published in the _American Magazine_ (one
chapter, that on lynching, in _McClure's Magazine_) I received many
hundreds of letters from all parts of the country. I acknowledge them
gratefully. Many of them contained friendly criticisms, suggestions, and
corrections, which I have profited by in the revision of the chapters for
book publication. Especially have the letters from the South, describing
local conditions and expressing local points of view, been valuable to me.
I wish here, also, to thank the many men and women, South and North, white
and coloured, who have given me personal assistance in my inquiries.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PREFACE vii
PART I
THE NEGRO IN THE SOUTH
I. A Race Riot and After 3
II. Following the Colour Line in the South: A
Superficial View of Conditions 26
III. The Southern City Negro 45
IV. In the Black Belt: The Negro Farmer 66
V. Race Relationships in the Country Districts 87
PART II
THE NEGRO IN THE NORTH
VI. Following the Colour Line in the North 109
VII. The Negroes' Struggle for Survival in Northern
Cities 130
PART III
THE NEGRO IN THE NATION
VIII. The Mulatto: The Problem of Race Mixture 151
IX. Lynching, South and North 175
X. An Ostracised Race in Ferment: The Conflict of
Negro Parties and Negro Leaders over Methods
of Dealing with Their Own Problem 216
XI. The Negro in Politics 233
XII. The Black Man's Silent Power 252
XIII. The New Southern Statesmanship 271
XIV. What to Do About the Negro--A Few Conclusions 292
Index 311
ILLUSTRATIONS
An Old Black "Mammy" with White Child _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Fac-similes of Certain Atlanta Newspapers of
September 22, 1906 7
James H. Wallace 10
R. R. Wright 10
H. O. Tanner 10
Rev. H. H. Proctor 10
Dr. W. F. Penn 10
George W. Cable 10
Showing how the Colour Line Was Drawn by the Saloons
at Atlanta, Georgia 35
Interior of a Negro Working-man's Home, Atlanta,
Georgia 46
Interior of a Negro Home of the Poorest Sort in
Indianapolis 46
Map Showing the Black Belt 66
Where White Mill Hands Live in Atlanta, Georgia 71
Where some of the Poorer Negroes Live in Atlanta,
Georgia 71
A "Poor White" Family 74
A Model Negro School 74
Old and New Cabins for Negro Tenants on the Brown
Plantation 85
Cane Syrup Kettle 92
Chain-gang Workers on the Roads 92
A Type of the Country Chain-gang Negro 99
A Negro Cabin with Evidences of Abundance 110
Off for the Cotton Fields 110
Ward in a Negro Hospital at Philadelphia 135
Studio of a Negro Sculptress 135
A Negro Magazine Editor's Office in Philadelphia 138
A "Broom Squad" of Negro Boys 138
A Type of Negro Girl Typesetter in Atlanta 164
Mulatto Girl Student 164
Miss Cecelia Johnson 164
Mrs. Booker T. Washington 173
Mrs. Robert H. Terrell 173
Negroes Lynched by Being Burned Alive at Statesboro,
Georgia 179
Negroes of the Criminal Type 179
Court House and Bank in the Public Square at
Huntsville, Alabama 190
Charles W. Chesnutt 215
Dr. Booker T. Washington 218
Dr. W. E. B. DuBois 225
Colonel James Lewis 240
W. T. Vernon 240
Ralph W. Tyler 240
J. Pope Brown 252
James K. Vardaman 252
Senator Jeff Davis 252
Governor Hoke Smith 252
Senator B. R. Tillman 252
Ex-Governor W. J. Northen 252
James H. Dillard 275
Edwin A. Alderman 275
A. M. Soule 275
D. F. Houston 275
George Foster Peabody 275
P. P. Claxton 275
S. C. Mitchell 286
Judge Emory Speer 286
Edgar Gardner Murphy 286
Dr. H. B. Frissell 286
R. C. Ogden 286
J. Y. Joyner 286
_PART ONE_
THE NEGRO IN THE SOUTH
CHAPTER I
A RACE RIOT, AND AFTER
Upon the ocean, of antagonism between the white and Negro races in this
country, there arises occasionally a wave, stormy in its appearance, but
soon subsiding into quietude. Such a wave was the Atlanta riot. Its
ominous size, greater by far than the ordinary race disturbances which
express themselves in lynchings, alarmed the entire country and awakened
in the South a new sense of the dangers which threatened it. A description
of that spectacular though superficial disturbance, the disaster incident
to its fury, and the remarkable efforts at reconstruction will lead the
way naturally--as human nature is best interpreted in moments of
passion--to a clearer understanding, in future chapters, of the deep and
complex race feeling which exists in this country.
On the twenty-second day of September, 1906, Atlanta had become a
veritable social tinder-box. For months the relation of the races had been
growing more strained. The entire South had been sharply annoyed by a
shortage of labour accompanied by high wages and, paradoxically, by an
increasing number of idle Negroes. In Atlanta the lower class--the
"worthless Negro"--had been increasing in numbers: it showed itself too
evidently among the swarming saloons, dives, and "clubs" which a
complaisant city administration allowed to exist in the very heart of the
city. Crime had increased to an alarming extent; an insufficient and
ineffective police force seemed unable to cope with it. With a population
of 115,000 Atlanta had over 17,000 arrests in 1905; in 1906 the number
increased to 21,602. Atlanta had many more arrests than New Orleans with
nearly three times the population and twice as many Negroes; and almost
four times as many as Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a city nearly three times as
large. Race feeling had been sharpened through a long and bitter
political campaign, Negro disfranchisement being one of the chief issues
under discussion. An inflammatory play called "The Clansman," though
forbidden by public sentiment in many Southern cities, had been given in
Atlanta and other places with the effect of increasing the prejudice of
both races. Certain newspapers in Atlanta, taking advantage of popular
feeling, kept the race issue constantly agitated, emphasising Negro crimes
with startling headlines. One newspaper even recommended the formation of
organisations of citizens in imitation of the Ku Klux movement of
reconstruction days. In the clamour of this growing agitation, the voice
of the right-minded white people and industrious, self-respecting Negroes
was almost unheard. A few ministers of both races saw the impending storm
and sounded a warning--to no effect; and within the week before the riot
the citizens, the city administration and the courts all woke up together.
There were calls for mass-meetings, the police began to investigate the
conditions of the low saloons and dives, the country constabulary was
increased in numbers, the grand jury was called to meet in special session
on Monday the 24th.
_Prosperity and Lawlessness_
But the awakening of moral sentiment in the city, unfortunately, came too
late. Crime, made more lurid by agitation, had so kindled the fires of
hatred that they could not be extinguished by ordinary methods. The best
people of Atlanta were like the citizens of prosperous Northern cities,
too busy with money-making to pay attention to public affairs. For Atlanta
is growing rapidly. Its bank clearings jumped from ninety millions in 1900
to two hundred and twenty-two millions in 1906, its streets are well paved
and well lighted, its street-car service is good, its sky-scrapers are
comparable with the best in the North. In other words, it was
progressive--few cities I know of more so--but it had forgotten its public
duties.
Within a few months before the riot there had been a number of crimes of
worthless Negroes against white women. Leading Negroes, while not one of
them with whom I talked wished to protect any Negro who was really
guilty, asserted that the number of these crimes had been greatly
exaggerated and that in special instances the details had been
over-emphasised because the criminal was black; that they had been used to
further inflame race hatred. I had a personal investigation made of every
crime against a white woman committed in the few months before and after
the riot. Three, charged to white men, attracted comparatively little
attention in the newspapers, although one, the offence of a white man
named Turnadge, was shocking in its details. Of twelve such charges
against Negroes in the six months preceding the riot two were cases of
rape, horrible in their details, three were aggravated attempts at rape,
three may have been attempts, three were pure cases of fright on the part
of the white woman, and in one the white woman, first asserting that a
Negro had assaulted her, finally confessed attempted suicide.
The facts of two of these cases I will narrate--and without excuse for the
horror of the details. If we are to understand the true conditions in the
South, these things _must_ be told.
_Story of One Negro's Crime_
One of the cases was that of Mrs. Knowles Etheleen Kimmel, twenty-five
years old, wife of a farmer living near Atlanta. A mile beyond the end of
the street-car line stands a small green bungalow-like house in a lonely
spot near the edge of the pine woods. The Kimmels who lived there were not
Southerners by birth but of Pennsylvania Dutch stock. They had been in the
South four or five years, renting their lonesome farm, raising cotton and
corn and hopefully getting a little ahead. On the day before the riot a
strange rough-looking Negro called at the back door of the Kimmel home. He
wore a soldier's cast-off khaki uniform. He asked a foolish question and
went away. Mrs. Kimmel was worried and told her husband. He, too, was
worried--the fear of this crime is everywhere present in the South--and
when he went away in the afternoon he asked his nearest neighbour to look
out for the strange Negro. When he came back a few hours later, he found
fifty white men in his yard. He knew what had happened without being told:
his wife was under medical attendance in the house. She had been able to
give a clear description of the Negro: bloodhounds were brought, but the
pursuing white men had so obliterated the criminal's tracks that he could
not be traced. Through information given by a Negro a suspect was arrested
and nearly lynched before he could be brought to Mrs. Kimmel for
identification; when she saw him she said: "He is not the man." The real
criminal was never apprehended.
One day, weeks afterward, I found the husband working alone in his field;
his wife, to whom the surroundings had become unbearable, had gone away to
visit friends. He told me the story hesitatingly. His prospects, he said,
were ruined: his neighbours had been sympathetic but he could not continue
to live there with the feeling that they all knew. He was preparing to
give up his home and lose himself where people did not know his story. I
asked him if he favoured lynching, and his answer surprised me.
"I've thought about that," he said. "You see, I'm a Christian man, or I
try to be. My wife is a Christian woman. We've talked about it. What good
would it do? We should make criminals of ourselves, shouldn't we? No, let
the law take its course. When I came here, I tried to help the Negroes as
much as I could. But many of them won't work even when the wages are high:
they won't come when they agree to and when they get a few dollars ahead
they go down to the saloons in Atlanta. Everyone is troubled about getting
labour and everyone is afraid of prowling idle Negroes. Now, the thing has
come to me, and it's just about ruined my life."
When I came away the poor lonesome fellow followed me half-way up the
hill, asking: "Now, what would you do?"
One more case. One of the prominent florists in Atlanta is W. C. Lawrence.
He is an Englishman, whose home is in the outskirts of the city. On the
morning of August 20th his daughter Mabel, fourteen years old, and his
sister Ethel, twenty-five years old, a trained nurse who had recently come
from England, went out into the nearby woods to pick ferns. Being in broad
daylight and within sight of houses, they had no fear. Returning along an
old Confederate breastworks, they were met by a brutal-looking Negro with
a club in one hand and a stone in the other. He first knocked the little
girl down, then her aunt. When the child "came to" she found herself
partially bound with a rope. "Honey," said the Negro, "I want you to come
with me." With remarkable presence of mind the child said: "I can't, my
leg is broken," and she let it swing limp from the knee. Deceived, the
Negro went back to bind the aunt. Mabel, instantly untying the rope,
jumped up and ran for help. When he saw the child escaping the Negro ran
off.
[Illustration: FAC-SIMILES OF CERTAIN ATLANTA NEWSPAPERS OF SEPTEMBER 22,
1906
Showing the sensational news headings]
"When I got there," said Mr. Lawrence, "my sister was lying against the
bank, face down. The back of her head had been beaten bloody. The bridge
of her nose was cut open, one eye had been gouged out of its socket. My
daughter had three bad cuts on her head--thank God, nothing worse to
either. But my sister, who was just beginning her life, will be totally
blind in one eye, probably in both. Her life is ruined."
About a month later, through the information of a Negro, the criminal was
caught, identified by the Misses Lawrence, and sent to the penitentiary
for forty years (two cases), the limit of punishment for attempted
criminal assault.
In both of these cases arrests were made on the information of Negroes.
_Terror of Both White and Coloured People_
The effect of a few such crimes as these may be more easily imagined than
described. They produced a feeling of alarm which no one who has not lived
in such a community can in any wise appreciate. I was astonished in
travelling in the South to discover how widely prevalent this dread has
become. Many white women in Atlanta dare not leave their homes alone after
dark; many white men carry arms to protect themselves and their families.
And even these precautions do not always prevent attacks.
But this is not the whole story. Everywhere I went in Atlanta I heard of
the fear of the white people, but not much was said of the terror which
the Negroes also felt. And yet every Negro I met voiced in some way that
fear. It is difficult here in the North for us to understand what such a
condition means: a whole community namelessly afraid!
The better-class Negroes have two sources of fear: one of the criminals of
their own race--such attacks are rarely given much space in the
newspapers--and the other the fear of the white people. My very first
impression of what this fear of the Negroes might be came, curiously
enough, not from Negroes but from a fine white woman on whom I called
shortly after going South. She told this story:
"I had a really terrible experience one evening a few days ago. I was
walking along ---- Street when I saw a rather good-looking young Negro
come out of a hallway to the sidewalk. He was in a great hurry, and, in
turning suddenly, as a person sometimes will do, he accidentally brushed
my shoulder with his arm. He had not seen me before. When he turned and
found it was a white woman he had touched, such a look of abject terror
and fear came into his face as I hope never again to see on a human
countenance. He knew what it meant if I was frightened, called for help,
and accused him of insulting or attacking me. He stood still a moment,
then turned and ran down the street, dodging into the first alley he came
to. It shows, doesn't it, how little it might take to bring punishment
upon an innocent man!"
The next view I got was through the eyes of one of the able Negroes of the
South, Bishop Gaines of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He is now
an old man, but of imposing presence. Of wide attainments, he has
travelled in Europe, he owns much property, and rents houses to white
tenants. He told me of services he had held some time before in south
Georgia. Approaching the church one day through the trees, he suddenly
encountered a white woman carrying water from a spring. She dropped her
pail instantly, screamed, and ran up the path toward her house.
"If I had been some Negroes," said Bishop Gaines, "I should have turned
and fled in terror; the alarm would have been given, and it is not
unlikely that I should have had a posse of white men with bloodhounds on
my trail. If I had been caught what would my life have been worth? The
woman would have identified me--and what could I have said? But I did not
run. I stepped out in the path, held up one hand and said:
"'Don't worry, madam, I am Bishop Gaines, and I am holding services here
in this church.' So she stopped running and I apologised for having
startled her."
The Negro knows he has little chance to explain, if by accident or
ignorance he insults a white woman or offends a white man. An educated
Negro, one of the ablest of his race, telling me of how a friend of his
who by merest chance had provoked a number of half-drunken white men, had
been set upon and frightfully beaten, remarked: "It might have been me!"
Now, I am telling these things just as they look to the Negro; it is quite
as important, as a problem in human nature, to know how the Negro feels
and what he says, as it is to know how the white man feels.
_How the Newspapers Fomented the Riot_
On the afternoon of the riot the newspapers in flaming headlines
chronicled four assaults by Negroes on white women. I had a personal
investigation made of each of those cases. Two of them may have been
attempts at assaults, but two palpably were nothing more than fright on
the part of both the white woman and the Negro. As an instance, in one
case an elderly woman, Mrs. Martha Holcombe, going to close her blinds in
the evening, saw a Negro on the sidewalk. In a terrible fright she
screamed. The news was telephoned to the police station, but before the
officials could respond, Mrs. Holcombe telephoned them not to come out.
And yet this was one of the "assaults" chronicled in letters five inches
high in a newspaper extra.
And finally on this hot Saturday half-holiday, when the country people had
come in by hundreds, when everyone was out of doors, when the streets were
crowded, when the saloons had been filled since early morning with white
men and Negroes, both drinking--certain newspapers in Atlanta began to
print extras with big headings announcing new assaults on white women by
Negroes. The Atlanta News published five such extras, and newsboys cried
them through the city:
"Third assault."
"Fourth assault."
The whole city, already deeply agitated, was thrown into a veritable
state of panic. The news in the extras was taken as truthful; for the city
was not in a mood then for cool investigation. Calls began to come in from
every direction for police protection. A loafing Negro in a backyard, who
in ordinary times would not have been noticed, became an object of real
terror. The police force, too small at best, was thus distracted and
separated.
In Atlanta the proportion of men who go armed continually is very large;
the pawnshops of Decatur and Peters Streets, with windows like arsenals,
furnish the low class of Negroes and whites with cheap revolvers and
knives. Every possible element was here, then, for a murderous outbreak.
The good citizens, white and black, were far away in their homes; the bad
men had been drinking in the dives permitted to exist by the respectable
people of Atlanta; and here they were gathered, by night, in the heart of
the city.
_The Mob Gathers_
And, finally, a trivial incident fired the tinder. Fear and vengeance
generated it: it was marked at first by a sort of rough, half-drunken
horseplay, but when once blood was shed, the brute, which is none too well
controlled in the best city, came out and gorged itself. Once permit the
shackles of law and order to be cast off, and men, white or black,
Christian or pagan, revert to primordial savagery. There is no such thing
as an orderly mob.
Crime had been committed by Negroes, but this mob made no attempt to find
the criminals: it expressed its blind, unreasoning, uncontrolled race
hatred by attacking every man, woman, or boy it saw who had a black face.
A lame boot-black, an inoffensive, industrious Negro boy, at that moment
actually at work shining a man's shoes, was dragged out and cuffed, kicked
and beaten to death in the street. Another young Negro was chased and
stabbed to death with jack-knives in the most unspeakably horrible manner.
The mob entered barber shops where respectable Negro men were at work
shaving white customers, pulled them away from their chairs and beat them.
Cars were stopped and inoffensive Negroes were thrown through the windows
or dragged out and beaten. They did not stop with killing and maiming;
they broke into hardware stores and armed themselves, they demolished not
only Negro barber shops and restaurants, but they robbed stores kept by
white men.
[Illustration: JAMES H. WALLACE
"The asphalt workers are nearly all coloured. In New York ... the chosen
representative who sits with the Central Federated Union of the city is
James H. Wallace, a coloured man."]
[Illustration: R. R. WRIGHT
Organiser of the Negro State Fair in Georgia. Of full-blooded African
descent, his grandmother, who reared him, being an African Negro of the
Mandingo tribe.]
[Illustration: H. O. TANNER
One of whose pictures hangs in the Luxembourg; winner N. W. Harris prize
for the best American painting at Chicago.]
[Illustration: REV. H. H. PROCTOR
Pastor of the First Congregational Church (coloured), to which belong many
of the best coloured families of Atlanta.]
[Illustration: DR. W. F. PENN
This prosperous Negro physician's home in Atlanta was visited by the mob.]
[Illustration: GEORGE W. CABLE
Chairman of the coloured probation officers of the Juvenile Court,
Indianapolis.
Photograph by Sexton & Maxwell]
Of course the Mayor came out, and the police force and the fire
department, and finally the Governor ordered out the militia--to apply
that pound of cure which should have been an ounce of prevention.
It is highly significant of Southern conditions--which the North does not
understand--that the first instinct of thousands of Negroes in Atlanta,
when the riot broke out, was not to run away from the white people but to
run to them. The white man who takes the most radical position in
opposition to the Negro race will often be found loaning money to
individual Negroes, feeding them and their families from his kitchen, or
defending "his Negroes" in court or elsewhere. All of the more prominent
white citizens of Atlanta, during the riot, protected and fed many
coloured families who ran to them in their terror. Even Hoke Smith,
Governor-elect of Georgia, who is more distrusted by the Negroes as a race
probably than any other white man in Georgia, protected many Negroes in
his house during the disturbance. In many cases white friends armed
Negroes and told them to protect themselves. One widow I know of who had a
single black servant, placed a shot-gun in his hands and told him to fire
on any mob that tried to get him. She trusted him absolutely. Southern
people possess a real liking, wholly unknown in the North, for individual
Negroes whom they know.
So much for Saturday night. Sunday was quiescent but nervous--the
atmosphere full of the electricity of apprehension. Monday night, after a
day of alarm and of prowling crowds of men, which might at any moment
develop into mobs, the riot broke forth again--in a suburb of Atlanta
called Brownsville.
_Story of the Mob's Work in a Southern Negro Town_
When I went out to Brownsville, knowing of its bloody part in the riot, I
expected to find a typical Negro slum. I looked for squalour, ignorance,
vice. And I was surprised to find a large settlement of Negroes
practically every one of whom owned his own home, some of the houses being
as attractive without and as well furnished within as the ordinary homes
of middle-class white people. Near at hand, surrounded by beautiful
grounds, were two Negro colleges--Clark University and Gammon Theological
Seminary. The post-office was kept by a Negro. There were several stores
owned by Negroes. The school-house, though supplied with teachers by the
county, was built wholly with money personally contributed by the Negroes
of the neighbourhood, in order that there might be adequate educational
facilities for their children. They had three churches and not a saloon.
The residents were all of the industrious, property-owning sort, bearing
the best reputation among white people who knew them.
Think, then, of the situation in Brownsville during the riot in Atlanta.
All sorts of exaggerated rumours came from the city. _The Negroes of
Atlanta were being slaughtered wholesale._ A condition of panic fear
developed. Many of the people of the little town sought refuge in Gammon
Theological Seminary, where, packed together, they sat up all one night
praying. President Bowen did not have his clothes off for days, expecting
the mob every moment. He telephoned for police protection on Sunday, but
none was provided. Terror also existed among the families which remained
in Brownsville; most of the men were armed, and they had decided, should
the mob appear, to make a stand in defence of their homes.
At last, on Monday evening, just at dark, a squad of the county police,
led by Officer Poole, marched into the settlement at Brownsville. Here,
although there had been not the slightest sign of disturbance, they began
arresting Negroes for being armed. Several armed white citizens, who were
not officers, joined them.
Finally, looking up a little street they saw dimly in the next block a
group of Negro men. Part of the officers were left with the prisoners and
part went up the street. As they approached the group of Negroes, the
officers began firing: the Negroes responded. Officer Heard was shot dead;
another officer was wounded, and several Negroes were killed or injured.
The police went back to town with their prisoners. On the way two of the
Negroes in their charge were shot. A white man's wife, who saw the
outrage, being with child, dropped dead of fright.
The Negroes (all of this is now a matter of court record) declared that
they were expecting the mob; that the police--not mounted as usual, not
armed as usual, and accompanied by citizens--looked to them in the
darkness like a mob. In their fright the firing began.
The wildest reports, of course, were circulated. One sent broadcast was
that five hundred students of Clark University, all armed, had decoyed the
police in order to shoot them down. As a matter of fact, the university
did not open its fall session until October 3d, over a week later--and on
this night there were just two students on the grounds. The next morning
the police and the troops appeared and arrested a very large proportion of
the male inhabitants of the town. Police officers accompanied by white
citizens, entered one Negro home, where lay a man named Lewis, badly
wounded the night before. He was in bed; they opened his shirt, placed
their revolvers at his breast, and in cold blood shot him through the body
several times in the presence of his relatives. They left him for dead,
but he has since recovered.
President Bowen, of Gammon Theological Seminary, one of the able Negroes
in Atlanta, who had nothing whatever to do with the riot, was beaten over
the head by one of the police with his rifle-butt. The Negroes were all
disarmed, and about sixty of them were finally taken to Atlanta and locked
up charged with the murder of Officer Heard.
In the Brownsville riot four Negroes were killed. One was a decent,
industrious, though loud-talking, citizen named Fambro, who kept a small
grocery store and owned two houses besides, which he rented. He had a
comfortable home, a wife and one child. Another was an inoffensive Negro
named Wilder, seventy years old, a pensioner as a soldier of the Civil
War, who was well spoken of by all who knew him. He was found--not shot,
but murdered by a knife-cut in the abdomen--lying in a woodshed back of
Fambro's store. McGruder, a brick mason, who earned $4 a day at his trade,
and who had laid aside enough to earn his own home, was killed while under
arrest by the police; and Robinson, an industrious Negro carpenter, was
shot to death on his way to work Tuesday morning after the riot.
_Results of the Riot_
And after the riot in Brownsville, what? Here was a self-respecting
community of hard-working Negroes, disturbing no one, getting an honest
living. How did the riot affect them? Well, it demoralised them, set them
back for years. Not only were four men killed and several wounded, but
sixty of their citizens were in jail. Nearly every family had to go to the
lawyers, who would not take their cases without money in hand. Hence the
little homes had to be sold or mortgaged, or money borrowed in some other
way to defend those arrested, doctors' bills were to be paid, the
undertaker must be settled with. A riot is not over when the shooting
stops! And when the cases finally came up in court and all the evidence
was brought out every Negro went free; but two of the county policemen who
had taken part in the shooting, were punished. George Muse, one of the
foremost merchants of Atlanta, who was foreman of the jury which tried the
Brownsville Negroes, said:
"We think the Negroes were gathered just as white people were in other
parts of the town, for the purpose of defending their homes. We were
shocked by the conduct which the evidence showed some of the county police
had been guilty of."
After the riot was over many Negro families, terrified and feeling
themselves unprotected, sold out for what they could get--I heard a good
many pitiful stories of such sudden and costly sacrifices--and left the
country, some going to California, some to Northern cities. The best and
most enterprising are those who go: the worst remain. Not only did the
Negroes leave Brownsville, but they left the city itself in considerable
numbers. Labour was thus still scarcer and wages higher in Atlanta because
of the riot.
_Report of a White Committee on the Riot_
It is significant that not one of the Negroes killed and wounded in the
riot was of the criminal class. Every one was industrious, respectable
and law-abiding. A white committee, composed of W. G. Cooper, Secretary of
the Chamber of Commerce, and George Muse, a prominent merchant, backed by
the sober citizenship of the town, made an honest investigation and issued
a brave and truthful report. Here are a few of its conclusions:
1. Among the victims of the mob there was not a single vagrant.
2. They were earning wages in useful work up to the time of the riot.
3. They were supporting themselves and their families or dependent
relatives.
4. Most of the dead left small children and widows, mothers or
sisters with practically no means and very small earning capacity.
5. The wounded lost from one to eight weeks' time, at 50 cents to $4
a day each.
6. About seventy persons were wounded, and among these there was an
immense amount of suffering. In some cases it was prolonged and
excruciating pain.
7. Many of the wounded are disfigured, and several are permanently
disabled.
8. Most of them were in humble circumstances, but they were honest,
industrious and law-abiding citizens and useful members of society.
9. These statements are true of both white and coloured.
10. Of the wounded, ten are white and sixty are coloured. Of the
dead, two are white and ten are coloured; two female, and ten male.
This includes three killed at Brownsville.
11. Wild rumours of a larger number killed have no foundation that we
can discover. As the city was paying the funeral expenses of victims
and relief was given their families, they had every motive to make
known their loss. In one case relatives of a man killed in a broil
made fruitless efforts to secure relief.
12. Two persons reported as victims of the riot had no connection
with it. One, a Negro man, was killed in a broil over a crap game;
and another, a Negro woman, was killed by her paramour. Both
homicides occurred at some distance from the scene of the riot.
The men who made this brave report did not mince matters. They called
murder, murder; and robbery, robbery. Read this:
13. As twelve persons were killed and seventy were murderously
assaulted, and as, by all accounts, a number took part in each
assault, it is clear that several hundred murderers or would-be
murderers are at large in this community.
At first, after the riot, there was an inclination in some quarters to
say:
"Well, at any rate, the riot cleared the atmosphere. The Negroes have had
their lesson. There won't be any more trouble soon."
But read the sober conclusions in the Committee's report. The riot did not
prevent further crime.
14. Although less than three months have passed since the riot,
events have already demonstrated that the slaughter of the innocent
does not deter the criminal class from committing more crimes. Rapes
and robbery have been committed in the city during that time.
15. The slaughter of the innocent does drive away good citizens. From
one small neighbourhood twenty-five families have gone. A great many
of them were buying homes on the instalment plan.
16. The crimes of the mob include robbery as well as murder. In a
number of cases the property of innocent and unoffending people was
taken. Furniture was destroyed, small shops were looted, windows were
smashed, trunks were burst open, money was taken from the small
hoard, and articles of value were appropriated. In the commission of
these crimes the victims, both men and women, were treated with
unspeakable brutality.
17. As a result of four days of lawlessness there are in this glad
Christmas-time widows of both races mourning their husbands, and
husbands of both races mourning for their wives; there are orphan
children of both races who cry out in vain for faces they will see no
more; there are grown men of both races disabled for life, and all
this sorrow has come to people who are absolutely innocent of any
wrong-doing.
In trying to find out exactly the point of view and the feeling of the
Negroes--which is most important in any honest consideration of
conditions--I was handed the following letter, written by a young coloured
man, a former resident in Atlanta now a student in the North. He is
writing frankly to a friend. It is valuable as showing a _real_ point of
view--the bitterness, the hopelessness, the distrust.
"... It is possible that you have formed at least a good idea of how we
feel as the result of the horrible eruption in Georgia. I have not spoken
to a Caucasian on the subject since then. But, listen: How would you feel,
if with our history, there came a time when, after speeches and papers and
teachings you acquired property and were educated, and were a fairly good
man, it were impossible for you to walk the street (for whose maintenance
you were taxed) with your sister without being in mortal fear of death if
you resented any insult offered to her? How would you feel if you saw a
governor, a mayor, a sheriff, whom you could not oppose at the polls,
encourage by deed or word or both, a mob of 'best' and worst citizens to
slaughter your people in the streets and in their own homes and in their
places of business? Do you think that you could resist the same wrath that
caused God to slay the Philistines and the Russians to throw bombs? I can
resist it, but with each new outrage I am less able to resist it. And yet
if I gave way to my feelings I should become just like other men ... of
the mob! But I do not ... not quite, and I must hurry through the only
life I shall live on earth, tortured by these experiences and these
horrible impulses, with no hope of ever getting away from them. They are
ever present, like the just God, the devil, and my conscience.
"If there were no such thing as Christianity we should be hopeless."
Besides this effect on the Negroes the riot for a week or more practically
paralysed the city of Atlanta. Factories were closed, railroad cars were
left unloaded in the yards, the street-car system was crippled, and there
was no cab-service (cab-drivers being Negroes), hundreds of servants
deserted their places, the bank clearings slumped by hundreds of thousands
of dollars, the state fair, then just opening, was a failure. It was,
indeed, weeks before confidence was fully restored and the city returned
to its normal condition.
_Who Made Up the Mob?_
One more point I wish to make before taking up the extraordinary
reconstructive work which followed the riot. I have not spoken of the men
who made up the mob. We know the dangerous Negro class--after all a very
small proportion of the entire Negro population. There is a corresponding
low class of whites quite as illiterate as the Negroes.
The poor white hates the Negro, and the Negro dislikes the poor white. It
is in these lower strata of society, where the races rub together in
unclean streets, that the fire is generated. Decatur and Peters streets,
with their swarming saloons and dives, furnish the point of contact. I
talked with many people who saw the mobs at different times, and the
universal testimony was that it was made up largely of boys and young men,
and of the low criminal and semi-criminal class. The ignorant Negro and
the uneducated white; there lies the trouble!
This idea that 115,000 people of Atlanta--respectable, law-abiding, good
citizens, white and black--should be disgraced before the world by a few
hundred criminals was what aroused the strong, honest citizenship of
Atlanta to vigorous action.
The riot brought out all that was worst in human nature; the
reconstruction brought out all that was best and finest.
Almost the first act of the authorities was to close every saloon in the
city, afterward revoking all the licences--and for two weeks no liquor was
sold in the city. The police, at first accused of not having done their
best in dealing with the mob, arrested a good many white rioters, and
Judge Broyles, to show that the authorities had no sympathy with such
disturbers of the peace, sent every man brought before him, twenty-four in
all, to the chain gang for the largest possible sentence, without the
alternative of a fine. The grand jury met and boldly denounced the mob;
its report said in part:
"That the sensationalism of the afternoon papers in the presentation of
the criminal news to the public prior to the riots of Saturday night,
especially in the case of the Atlanta _News_, deserves our severest
condemnation."
But the most important and far-reaching effect of the riot was in arousing
the strong men of the city. It struck at the pride of those men of the
South, it struck at their sense of law and order, it struck at their
business interests. On Sunday following the first riot a number of
prominent men gathered at the Piedmont Hotel, and had a brief discussion;
but it was not until Tuesday afternoon, when the worst of the news from
Brownsville had come in, that they gathered in the court-house with the
serious intent of stopping the riot at all costs. Most of the prominent
men of Atlanta were present. Sam D. Jones, president of the Chamber of
Commerce, presided. One of the first speeches was made by Charles T.
Hopkins, who had been the leading spirit in the meetings on Sunday and
Monday. He expressed with eloquence the humiliation which Atlanta felt.
"Saturday evening at eight o'clock," he said, "the credit of Atlanta was
good for any number of millions of dollars in New York or Boston or any
financial centre; to-day we couldn't borrow fifty cents. The reputation we
have been building up so arduously for years has been swept away in two
short hours. Not by men who have made and make Atlanta, not by men who
represent the character and strength of our city, but by hoodlums,
understrappers and white criminals. Innocent Negro men have been struck
down for no crime whatever, while peacefully enjoying the life and liberty
guaranteed to every American citizen. The Negro race is a child race. We
are a strong race, their guardians. We have boasted of our superiority and
we have now sunk to this level--we have shed the blood of our helpless
wards. Christianity and humanity demand that we treat the Negro fairly. He
is here, and here to stay. He only knows how to do those things we teach
him to do; it is our Christian duty to protect him. I for one, and I
believe I voice the best sentiment of this city, am willing to lay down my
life rather than to have the scenes of the last few days repeated."
_The Plea of a Negro Physician_
In the midst of the meeting a coloured man arose rather doubtfully. He
was, however, promptly recognized as Dr. W. F. Penn, one of the foremost
coloured physicians of Atlanta, a graduate of Yale College--a man of much
influence among his people. He said that he had come to ask the protection
of the white men of Atlanta. He said that on the day before a mob had come
to his home; that ten white men, some of whose families he knew and had
treated professionally, had been sent into his house to look for concealed
arms; that his little girl had run to them, one after another, and begged
them not to shoot her father; that his life and the lives of his family
had afterward been threatened, so that he had had to leave his home; that
he had been saved from a gathering mob by a white man in an automobile.
"What shall we do?" he asked the meeting--and those who heard his speech
said that the silence was profound. "We have been disarmed: how shall we
protect our lives and property? If living a sober, industrious, upright
life, accumulating property and educating his children as best he knows
how, is not the standard by which a coloured man can live and be protected
in the South, what is to become of him? If the kind of life I have lived
isn't the kind you want, shall I leave and go North?
"When we aspire to be decent and industrious we are told that we are bad
examples to other coloured men. Tell us what your standards are for
coloured men. What are the requirements under which we may live and be
protected? What shall we do?"
When he had finished, Colonel A. J. McBride, a real estate owner and a
Confederate veteran, arose and said with much feeling that he knew Dr.
Penn and that he was a good man, and that Atlanta meant to protect such
men.
"If necessary," said Colonel McBride, "I will go out and sit on his porch
with a rifle."
Such was the spirit of this remarkable meeting. Mr. Hopkins proposed that
the white people of the city express their deep regret for the riot and
show their sympathy for the Negroes who had suffered at the hands of the
mob by raising a fund of money for their assistance. Then and there $4,423
was subscribed, to which the city afterward added $1,000.
But this was not all. These men, once thoroughly aroused, began looking to
the future, to find some new way of preventing the recurrence of such
disturbances.
A committee of ten, appointed to work with the public officials in
restoring order and confidence, consisted of some of the foremost citizens
of Atlanta:
Charles T. Hopkins, Sam D. Jones, President of the Chamber of Commerce; L.
Z. Rosser, president of the Board of Education; J. W. English, president
of the Fourth National Bank; Forrest Adair, a leading real estate owner;
Captain W. D. Ellis, a prominent lawyer; A. B. Steele, a wealthy lumber
merchant; M. L. Collier, a railroad man; John E. Murphy, capitalist; and
H. Y. McCord, president of a wholesale grocery house.
One of the first and most unexpected things that this committee did was to
send for several of the leading Negro citizens of Atlanta: the Rev. H. H.
Proctor, B. J. Davis, editor of the _Independent_, a Negro journal, the
Rev. E. P. Johnson, the Rev. E. R. Carter, the Rev. J. A. Rush, and Bishop
Holsey.
_Committees of the Two Races Meet_
This was the first important occasion in the South upon which an attempt
was made to get the two races together for any serious consideration of
their differences.
They held a meeting. The white men asked the Negroes, "What shall we do to
relieve the irritation?" The Negroes said that they thought that coloured
men were treated with unnecessary roughness on the street-cars and by the
police. The white members of the committee admitted that this was so and
promised to take the matter up immediately with the street-car company and
the police department, which was done. The discussion was harmonious.
After the meeting Mr. Hopkins said:
"I believe those Negroes understood the situation better than we did. I
was astonished at their intelligence and diplomacy. They never referred to
the riot: they were looking to the future. I didn't know that there were
such Negroes in Atlanta."
Out of this beginning grew the Atlanta Civic League. Knowing that race
prejudice was strong, Mr. Hopkins sent out 2,000 cards, inviting the most
prominent men in the city to become members. To his surprise 1,500
immediately accepted, only two refused, and those anonymously; 500 men not
formally invited were also taken as members. The league thus had the great
body of the best citizens of Atlanta behind it. At the same time Mr.
Proctor and his committee of Negroes had organised a Coloured Co-operative
Civic League, which secured a membership of 1,500 of the best coloured men
in the city. A small committee of Negroes met a small committee of the
white league.
Fear was expressed that there would be another riotous outbreak during the
Christmas holidays, and the league proceeded with vigour to prevent it.
New policemen were put on, and the committee worked with Judge Broyles and
Judge Roan in issuing statements warning the people against lawlessness.
They secured an agreement among the newspapers not to publish sensational
news; the sheriff agreed, if necessary, to swear in some of the best men
in town as extra deputies; they asked that saloons be closed at four
o'clock on Christmas Eve; and through the Negro committee, they brought
influence to bear to keep all coloured people off the streets. When two
county police got drunk at Brownsville and threatened Mrs. Fambro, the
wife of one of the Negroes killed in the riot, a member of the committee,
Mr. Seeley, publisher of the _Georgian_, informed the sheriff and sent
his automobile to Brownsville, where the policemen were arrested and
afterward discharged from the force. As a result, it was the quietest
Christmas Atlanta had had in years.
But the most important of all the work done, because of the spectacular
interest it aroused, was the defence of a Negro charged with an assault
upon a white woman. It is an extraordinary and dramatic story.
_Does a Riot Prevent Further Crime?_
Although many people said that the riot would prevent any more Negro
crime, several attacks on white women occurred within a few weeks
afterward. On November 13th Mrs. J. D. Camp, living in the suburbs of
Atlanta, was attacked in broad daylight in her home and brutally assaulted
by a Negro, who afterward robbed the house and escaped. Though the crime
was treated with great moderation by the newspapers, public feeling was
intense. A Negro was arrested, charged with the crime. Mr. Hopkins and his
associates believed that the best way to secure justice and prevent
lynchings was to have a prompt trial. Accordingly, they held a conference
with Judge Roan, as a result of which three lawyers in the city, Mr.
Hopkins, L. Z. Rosser, and J. E. McClelland, were appointed to defend the
accused Negro, serving without pay. A trial-jury, composed of twelve
citizens, among the most prominent in Atlanta, was called--one of the
ablest juries ever drawn in Georgia. There was a determination to have
immediate and complete justice.
The Negro arrested, one Joe Glenn, had been completely identified by Mrs.
Camp as her assailant. Although having no doubt of his guilt, the
attorneys went at the case thoroughly. The first thing they did was to
call in two members of the Negro committee, Mr. Davis and Mr. Carter.
These men went to the jail and talked with Glenn, and afterward they all
visited the scene of the crime. They found that Glenn, who was a man fifty
years old with grandchildren, bore an excellent reputation. He rented a
small farm about two miles from Mrs. Camp's home and had some property; he
was sober and industrious. After making a thorough examination and
getting all the evidence they could, they came back to Atlanta, persuaded,
in spite of the fact that the Negro had been positively identified by Mrs.
Camp--which in these cases is usually considered conclusive--that Glenn
was not guilty. It was a most dramatic trial; at first, when Mrs. Camp was
placed on the stand she failed to identify Glenn; afterward, reversing
herself she broke forth into a passionate denunciation of him. But after
the evidence was all in, the jury retired, and reported two minutes later
with a verdict "Not guilty." Remarkably enough, just before the trial was
over the police informed the court that another Negro, named Will Johnson,
answering Mrs. Camp's description, had been arrested, charged with the
crime. He was subsequently identified by Mrs. Camp.
Without this energetic defence, an innocent, industrious Negro would
certainly have been hanged--or if the mob had been ahead of the police, as
it usually is, he would have been lynched.
But what of Glenn afterward?
When the jury left the box Mr. Hopkins turned to Glenn and said:
"Well, Joe, what do you think of the case?"
He replied: "Boss I 'spec's they will hang me, for that lady said I was
the man, but they won't hang me, will they, 'fore I sees my wife and
chilluns again?"
He was kept in the tower that night and the following day for protection
against a possible lynching. Plans were made by his attorneys to send him
secretly out of the city to the home of a farmer in Alabama, whom they
could trust with the story. Glenn's wife was brought to visit the jail and
Glenn was told of the plans for his safety, and instructed to change his
name and keep quiet until the feeling of the community could be
ascertained.
A ticket was purchased by his attorneys, with a new suit of clothes, hat,
and shoes. He was taken out of jail about midnight under a strong guard,
and safely placed on the train. From that day to this he has never been
heard of. He did not go to Alabama. The poor creature, with the instinct
of a hunted animal, did not dare after all to trust the white men who had
befriended him. He is a fugitive, away from his family, not daring,
though innocent, to return to his home.
_Other Reconstruction Movements_
Another strong movement also sprung into existence. Its inspiration was
religious. Ministers wrote a series of letters to the Atlanta
_Constitution_. Clark Howell, its editor, responded with an editorial
entitled "Shall We Blaze the Trail?" W. J. Northen, Ex-Governor of
Georgia, and one of the most highly respected men in the state, took up
the work, asking himself, as he says:
"What am I to do, who have to pray every night?"
He answered that question by calling a meeting at the Coloured Y. M. C. A.
building, where some twenty white men met an equal number of Negroes,
mostly preachers, and held a prayer meeting.
The South still looks to its ministers for leadership--and they really
lead. The sermons of men like the Rev. John E. White, the Rev. C. B.
Wilmer, the Rev. W. W. Landrum, who have spoken with power and ability
against lawlessness and injustice to the Negro, have had a large influence
in the reconstruction movement.
Ex-Governor Northen travelled through the state of Georgia, made a notable
series of speeches, urged the establishment of law and order
organisations, and met support wherever he went. He talked against mob-law
and lynching in plain language. Here are some of the things he said:
"We shall never settle this until we give absolute justice to the Negro.
We are not now doing justice to the Negro in Georgia.
"Get into contact with the best Negroes; there are plenty of good Negroes
in Georgia. What we must do is to get the good white folks to leaven the
bad white folks and the good Negroes to leaven the bad Negroes."
"There must be no aristocracy of crime: a white fiend is as much to be
dreaded as a black brute."
These movements did not cover specifically, it will be observed, the
enormously difficult problems of politics, and the political relationships
of the races, nor the subject of Negro education, nor the most
exasperating of all the provocatives--those problems which arise from
human contact in street cars, railroad trains, and in life generally.
That they had to meet the greatest difficulties in their work is shown by
such an editorial as the following, published December 12th by the Atlanta
_Evening News_:
No law of God or man can hold back the vengeance of our white men
upon such a criminal [the Negro who attacks a white woman]. If
necessary, we will double and treble and quadruple the law of Moses,
and hang off-hand the criminal, or failing to find that a remedy, we
will hang two, three, or four of the Negroes nearest to the crime,
until the crime is no longer done or feared in all this Southern land
that we inhabit and love.
On January 31, 1907, the newspaper which published this editorial went
into the hands of a receiver--its failure being due largely to the strong
public sentiment against its course before and during the riot.
After the excitement of the riot and the evil results which followed it
began to disappear it was natural that the reconstruction movements should
quiet down. Ex-Governor Northen continued his work for many months and is
indeed, still continuing it: and there is no doubt that his campaigns have
had a wide influence. The feeling that the saloons and dives of Atlanta
were partly responsible for the riot was a powerful factor in the
anti-saloon campaign which took place in 1907 and resulted in closing
every saloon in the state of Georgia on January 1, 1908. And the riot and
the revulsion which followed it will combine to make a recurrence of such
a disturbance next to impossible.
CHAPTER II
FOLLOWING THE COLOUR LINE IN THE SOUTH
Before entering upon a discussion of the more serious aspects of the Negro
question in the South, it may prove illuminating if I set down, briefly,
some of the more superficial evidences of colour line distinctions in the
South as they impress the investigator. The present chapter consists of a
series of sketches from my note-books giving the earliest and freshest
impressions of my studies in the South.
When I first went South I expected to find people talking about the Negro,
but I was not at all prepared to find the subject occupying such an
overshadowing place in Southern affairs. In the North we have nothing at
all like it; no question which so touches every act of life, in which
everyone, white or black, is so profoundly interested. In the North we are
mildly concerned in many things; the South is overwhelmingly concerned in
this one thing.
And this is not surprising, for the Negro in the South is both the labour
problem and the servant question; he is preeminently the political issue,
and his place, socially, is of daily and hourly discussion. A Negro
minister I met told me a story of a boy who went as a sort of butler's
assistant in the home of a prominent family in Atlanta. His people were
naturally curious about what went on in the white man's house. One day
they asked him:
"What do they talk about when they're eating?"
The boy thought a moment; then he said:
"Mostly they discusses us culled folks."
_What Negroes Talk About_
The same consuming interest exists among the Negroes. A very large part of
their conversation deals with the race question. I had been at the
Piedmont Hotel only a day or two when my Negro waiter began to take
especially good care of me. He flecked off imaginary crumbs and gave me
unnecessary spoons. Finally, when no one was at hand, he leaned over and
said:
"I understand you're down here to study the Negro problem."
"Yes," I said, a good deal surprised. "How did you know it?"
"Well, sir," he replied, "we've got ways of knowing things."
He told me that the Negroes had been much disturbed ever since the riot
and that he knew many of them who wanted to go North. "The South," he
said, "is getting to be too dangerous for coloured people." His language
and pronunciation were surprisingly good. I found that he was a college
student, and that he expected to study for the ministry.
"Do you talk much about these things among yourselves?" I asked.
"We don't talk about much else," he said. "It's sort of life and death
with us."
Another curious thing happened not long afterward. I was lunching with
several fine Southern men, and they talked, as usual, with the greatest
freedom in the full hearing of the Negro waiters. Somehow, I could not
help watching to see if the Negroes took any notice of what was said. I
wondered if they were sensitive. Finally, I put the question to one of my
friends:
"Oh," he said, "we never mind them; they don't care."
One of the waiters instantly spoke up:
"No, don't mind me; I'm only a block of wood."
_First Views of the Negroes_
I set out from the hotel on the morning of my arrival to trace the colour
line as it appears, outwardly, in the life of such a town.
Atlanta is a singularly attractive place, as bright and new as any Western
city. Sherman left it in ashes at the close of the war; the old buildings
and narrow streets were swept away and a new city was built, which is now
growing in a manner not short of astonishing. It has 115,000 to 125,000
inhabitants, about a third of whom are Negroes, living in more or less
detached quarters in various parts of the city, and giving an
individuality to the life interesting enough to the unfamiliar Northerner.
A great many of them are always on the streets far better dressed and
better-appearing than I had expected to see--having in mind, perhaps, the
tattered country specimens of the penny postal cards. Crowds of Negroes
were at work mending the pavement, for the Italian and Slav have not yet
appeared in Atlanta, nor indeed to any extent anywhere in the South. I
stopped to watch a group of them. A good deal of conversation was going
on, here and there a Negro would laugh with great good humour, and several
times I heard a snatch of a song: much jollier workers than our grim
foreigners, but evidently not working so hard. A fire had been built to
heat some of the tools, and a black circle of Negroes were gathered around
it like flies around a drop of molasses and they were all talking while
they warmed their shins--evidently having plenty of leisure.
As I continued down the street, I found that all the drivers of waggons
and cabs were Negroes; I saw Negro newsboys, Negro porters, Negro barbers,
and it being a bright day, many of them were in the street--on the sunny
side.
I commented that evening to some Southern people I met, on the impression,
almost of jollity, given by the Negro workers I had seen. One of the older
ladies made what seemed to me a very significant remark.
"They don't sing as they used to," she said. "You should have known the
old darkeys of the plantation. Every year, it seems to me, they have been
losing more and more of their care-free good humour. I sometimes feel that
I don't know them any more. Since the riot they have grown so glum and
serious that I'm free to say I'm scared of them!"
One of my early errands that morning led me into several of the great new
office buildings, which bear testimony to the extraordinary progress of
the city. And here I found one of the first evidences of the colour line
for which I was looking. In both buildings, I found a separate elevator
for coloured people. In one building, signs were placed reading:
FOR WHITES ONLY
In another I copied this sign:
THIS CAR FOR COLOURED PASSENGERS,
FREIGHT, EXPRESS AND PACKAGES
Curiously enough, as giving an interesting point of view, an intelligent
Negro with whom I was talking a few days later asked me:
"Have you seen the elevator sign in the Century Building?"
I said I had.
"How would you like to be classed with 'freight, express and packages'?"
I found that no Negro ever went into an elevator devoted to white people,
but that white people often rode in cars set apart for coloured people. In
some cases the car for Negroes is operated by a white man, and in other
cases, all the elevators in a building are operated by coloured men. This
is one of the curious points of industrial contact in the South which
somewhat surprise the Northern visitor. In the North a white workman will
often refuse to work with a Negro; in the South, while the social
prejudice is strong, Negroes and whites work together side by side in many
kinds of employment.
I had an illustration in point not long afterward. Passing the post
office, I saw several mail-carriers coming out, some white, some black,
talking and laughing, with no evidence, at first, of the existence of any
colour line. Interested to see what the real condition was, I went in and
made inquiries. A most interesting and significant condition developed. I
found that the postmaster, who is a wise man, sent Negro carriers up
Peachtree and other fashionable streets, occupied by wealthy white people,
while white carriers were assigned to beats in the mill districts and
other parts of town inhabited by the poorer classes of white people.
"You see," said my informant, "the Peachtree people know how to treat
Negroes. They really prefer a Negro carrier to a white one; it's natural
for them to have a Negro doing such service. But if we sent Negro carriers
down into the mill district they might get their heads knocked off."
Then he made a philosophical observation:
"If we had only the best class of white folks down here and the
industrious Negroes, there wouldn't be any trouble."
_The Jim Crow Car_
One of the points in which I was especially interested was the "Jim Crow"
regulations, that is, the system of separation of the races in street cars
and railroad trains. Next to the question of Negro suffrage, I think the
people of the North have heard more of the Jim Crow legislation than of
anything else connected with the Negro problem. The street car is an
excellent place for observing the points of human contact between the
races, betraying as it does every shade of feeling upon the part of both.
In almost no other relationship do the races come together, physically, on
anything like a common footing. In their homes and in ordinary employment,
they meet as master and servant; but in the street cars they touch as free
citizens, each paying for the right to ride, the white not in a place of
command, the Negro without an obligation of servitude. Street-car
relationships are, therefore, symbolic of the new conditions. A few years
ago the Negro came and went in the street cars in most cities and sat
where he pleased, but gradually Jim Crow laws or local regulations were
passed, forcing him into certain seats at the back of the car.
While I was in Atlanta, the newspapers reported two significant new
developments in the policy of separation. In Savannah Jim Crow ordinances
have gone into effect for the first time, causing violent protestations on
the part of the Negroes and a refusal by many of them to use the cars at
all. Montgomery, Ala., about the same time, went one step further and
demanded, not separate seats in the same car, but entirely separate cars
for whites and blacks. There could be no better visible evidence of the
increasing separation of the races, and of the determination of the white
man to make the Negro "keep his place," than the evolution of the Jim Crow
regulations.
I was curious to see how the system worked out in Atlanta. Over the door
of each car, I found this sign:
WHITE PEOPLE WILL SEAT FROM FRONT OF CAR TOWARD
THE BACK AND COLORED PEOPLE FROM REAR TOWARD FRONT
Sure enough, I found the white people in front and the Negroes behind. As
the sign indicates, there is no definite line of division between the
white seats and the black seats, as in many other Southern cities. This
very absence of a clear demarcation is significant of many relationships
in the South. The colour line is drawn, but neither race knows just where
it is. Indeed, it can hardly be definitely drawn in many relationships,
because it is constantly changing. This uncertainty is a fertile source of
friction and bitterness. The very first time I was on a car in Atlanta, I
saw the conductor--all conductors are white--ask a Negro woman to get up
and take a seat farther back in order to make a place for a white man. I
have also seen white men requested to leave the Negro section of the car.
At one time, when I was on a car the conductor shouted: "Heh, you nigger,
get back there," which the Negro, who had taken a seat too far forward,
proceeded hastily to do.
No other one point of race contact is so much and so bitterly discussed
among the Negroes as the Jim Crow car. I don't know how many Negroes
replied to my question: "What is the chief cause of friction down here?"
with a complaint of their treatment on street cars and in railroad trains.
_Why the Negro Objects to the Jim Crow Car_
Fundamentally, of course they object to any separation which gives them
inferior accommodations. This point of view--and I am trying to set down
every point of view, both coloured and white, exactly as I find it, is
expressed in many ways.
"We pay first-class fare," said one of the leading Negroes in Atlanta,
"exactly as the white man does, but we don't get first-class service. I
say it isn't fair."
In answer to this complaint, the white man says: "The Negro is inferior,
he must be made to keep his place. Give him a chance and he assumes social
equality, and that will lead to an effort at intermarriage and
amalgamation of the races. The Anglo-Saxon will never stand for that."
One of the first complaints made by the Negroes after the riot, was of
rough and unfair treatment on the street cars.
The committee admitted that the Negroes were not always well treated on
the cars, and promised to improve conditions. Charles T. Hopkins, a leader
in the Civic League and one of the prominent lawyers of the city, told me
that he believed the Negroes should be given their definite seats in every
car; he said that he personally made it a practice to stand up rather than
to take any one of the four back seats, which he considered as belonging
to the Negroes. Two other leading men, on a different occasion, told me
the same thing.
One result of the friction over the Jim Crow regulations is that many
Negroes ride on the cars as little as possible. One prominent Negro I met
said he never entered a car, and that he had many friends who pursued the
same policy; he said that Negro street car excursions, familiar a few
years ago, had entirely ceased. It is significant of the feeling that one
of the features of the Atlanta riot was an attack on the street cars in
which all Negroes were driven out of their seats. One Negro woman was
pushed through an open window, and, after falling to the pavement, she was
dragged by the leg across the sidewalk and thrown through a shop window.
In another case when the mob stopped a car the motorman, instead of
protecting his passengers, went inside and beat down a Negro with his
brass control-lever.
_Story of an Encounter on a Street Car_
I heard innumerable stories from both white people and Negroes of
encounters in the street cars. Dr. W. F. Penn, one of the foremost Negro
physicians of the city, himself partly white, a graduate of Yale College,
told me of one occasion in which he entered a car and found there Mrs.
Crogman, wife of the coloured president of Clark University. Mrs. Crogman
is a mulatto so light of complexion as to be practically undistinguishable
from white people. Dr. Penn, who knew her well, sat down beside her and
began talking. A white man who occupied a seat in front with his wife
turned and said:
"Here, you nigger, get out of that seat. What do you mean by sitting down
with a white woman?"
Dr. Penn replied somewhat angrily:
"It's come to a pretty pass when a coloured man cannot sit with a woman of
his own race in his own part of the car."
The white man turned to his wife and said:
"Here, take these bundles. I'm going to thrash that nigger."
In half a minute the car was in an uproar, the two men struggling.
Fortunately the conductor and motorman were quickly at hand, and Dr. Penn
slipped off the car.
Conditions on the railroad trains, while not resulting so often in
personal encounters, are also the cause of constant irritation. When I
came South, I took particular pains to observe the arrangement on the
trains. In some cases Negroes are given entire cars at the front of the
train, at other times they occupy the rear end of a combination coach and
baggage car, which is used in the North as a smoking compartment. The
complaint here is that, while the Negro is required to pay first-class
fare, he is provided with second-class accommodations. Well-to-do Negroes
who can afford to travel, also complain that they are not permitted to
engage sleeping-car berths. Booker T. Washington usually takes a
compartment where he is entirely cut off from the white passengers. Some
other Negroes do the same thing, although they are often refused even this
expensive privilege. Railroad officials with whom I talked, and it is
important to hear what they say, said that it was not only a question of
public opinion--which was absolutely opposed to any intermingling of the
races in the cars--but that Negro travel in most places was small compared
with white travel, that the ordinary Negro was unclean and careless, and
that it was impractical to furnish them the same accommodations, even
though it did come hard on a few educated Negroes. They said that when
there was a delegation of Negroes, enough to fill an entire sleeping car,
they could always get accommodations. All of which gives a glimpse of the
enormous difficulties accompanying the separation of the races in the
South.
Another interesting point significant of tendencies came early to my
attention. They had recently finished at Atlanta one of the finest
railroad stations in this country. The ordinary depot in the South has two
waiting-rooms of about the same size, one for whites and one for Negroes.
But when this new station was built the whole front was given up to white
people, and the Negroes were assigned a side entrance, and a small
waiting-room. Prominent coloured men regarded it as a new evidence of the
crowding out of the Negro, the further attempt to give him unequal
accommodations, to handicap him in his struggle for survival. A delegation
was sent to the railroad people to protest, but to no purpose. Result:
further bitterness. There are in the station two lunch-rooms, one for
whites, one for Negroes.
A leading coloured man said to me:
"No Negro goes to the lunch-room in the station who can help it. We don't
like the way we have been treated."
_A Negro Boycott_
Of course this was an unusually intelligent coloured man, and he spoke for
his own sort; how far the same feeling of a race consciousness strong
enough to carry out such a boycott as this--and it is like the boycott of
a labour union--actuates the masses of ignorant Negroes is a question upon
which I hope to get more light as I proceed. I have already heard more
than one coloured leader complain that Negroes do not stand together. And
a white planter, whom I met in the hotel, said a significant thing along
this very line:
"If once the Negroes got together and saved their money, they'd soon own
the country, but they can't do it, and they never will."
After I had begun to trace the colour line I found evidences of it
everywhere--literally in every department of life. In the theatres,
Negroes never sit downstairs, but the galleries are black with them. Of
course, white hotels and restaurants are entirely barred to Negroes, with
the result that coloured people have their own eating and sleeping places,
many of them inexpressibly dilapidated and unclean. "Sleepers wanted" is a
familiar sign in Atlanta, giving notice of places where for a few cents a
Negro can find a bed or a mattress on the floor, often in a room where
there are many other sleepers, sometimes both men and women in the same
room crowded together in a manner both unsanitary and immoral. No good
public accommodations exist for the educated or well-to-do Negro in
Atlanta, although other cities are developing good Negro hotels. Indeed
one cannot long remain in the South without being impressed with extreme
difficulties which beset the exceptional coloured man.
[Illustration: COMPANION PICTURES
Showing how the colour line was drawn by the saloons at Atlanta, Georgia.
Many of the saloons for Negroes were kept by foreigners, usually Jews.]
In slavery time many Negroes attended white churches and Negro children
were often taught by white women. Now, a Negro is never (or very rarely)
seen in a white man's church. Once since I have been in the South, I saw a
very old Negro woman, some much-loved mammy, perhaps--sitting down in
front near the pulpit, but that is the only exception to the rule that has
come to my attention. Negroes are not wanted in white churches.
Consequently the coloured people have some sixty churches of their own in
Atlanta. Of course, the schools are separate, and have been ever since the
Civil War.
In one of the parks of Atlanta I saw this sign:
NO NEGROES ALLOWED IN THIS PARK
_Colour Line in the Public Library_
A story significant of the growing separation of the races is told about
the public library at Atlanta, which no Negro is permitted to enter.
Carnegie gave the money for building it, and when the question came up as
to the support of it by the city, the inevitable colour question arose.
Leading Negroes asserted that their people should be allowed admittance,
that they needed such an educational advantage even more than white
people, and that they were to be taxed their share--even though it was
small--for buying the books and maintaining the building. They did not win
their point of course, but Mr. Carnegie proposed a solution of the
difficulty by offering more money to build a Negro branch library,
provided the city would give the land and provide for its support. The
city said to the Negroes:
"You contribute the land and we will support the library."
Influential Negroes at once arranged for buying and contributing a site
for the library. Then the question of control arose. The Negroes thought
that inasmuch as they gave the land and the building was to be used
entirely for coloured people, they should have one or two members on the
board of control. This the city officials, who had charge of the matter,
would not hear of; result, the Negroes would not give the land, and the
branch library has never been built.
Right in this connection: while I was in Atlanta, the Art School, which in
the past has often used Negro models, decided to draw the colour line
there, too, and no longer employ them.
Formerly Negroes and white men went to the same saloons, and drank at the
same bars, as they do now, I am told, in some parts of the South. In a few
instances, in Atlanta, there were Negro saloon-keepers, and many Negro
bartenders. The first step toward separation was to divide the bar, the
upper end for white men, the lower for Negroes. After the riot, by a new
ordinance no saloon was permitted to serve both white and coloured men.
Consequently, going along Decatur Street, one sees the saloons designated
by conspicuous signs:[1]
"WHITES ONLY" "COLOURED ONLY"
And when the Negro suffers the ordinary consequences of a prolonged visit
to Decatur Street, and finds himself in the city prison, he is separated
there, too, from the whites. And afterward in court, if he comes to trial,
two Bibles are provided; he may take his oath on one; the other is for the
white man. When he dies he is buried in a separate cemetery.
One curious and enlightening example of the infinite ramifications of the
colour line was given me by Mr. Logan, secretary of the Atlanta Associated
Charities, which is supported by voluntary contributions. One day, after
the riot, a subscriber called Mr. Logan on the telephone and said: "Do you
help Negroes in your society?"
"Why, yes, occasionally," said Mr. Logan.
"What do you do that for?"
"A Negro gets hungry and cold like anybody else," answered Mr. Logan.
"Well, you can strike my name from your subscription list. I won't give
any of my money to a society that helps Negroes."
_Psychology of the South_
Now, this sounds rather brutal, but behind it lies the peculiar psychology
of the South. This very man who refused to contribute to the associated
charities, may have fed several Negroes from his kitchen and had a number
of Negro pensioners who came to him regularly for help. It was simply
amazing to me, considering the bitterness of racial feeling, to see how
lavish many white families are in giving food, clothing, and money to
individual Negroes whom they know. A Negro cook often supports her whole
family, including a lazy husband, on what she gets daily from the white
man's kitchen. In some old families the "basket habit" of the Negroes is
taken for granted; in the newer ones, it is, significantly, beginning to
be called stealing, showing that the old order is passing and that the
Negro is being held more and more strictly to account, not as a dependent
vassal, but as a moral being, who must rest upon his own responsibility.
And often a Negro of the old sort will literally bulldoze his hereditary
white protector into the loan of quarters and half dollars, which both
know will never be paid back.
Mr. Brittain, superintendent of schools in Fulton County, gave me an
incident in point. A big Negro with whom he was wholly unacquainted came
to his office one day, and demanded--he did not ask, but demanded--a job.
"What's your name?" asked the superintendent.
"Marion Luther Brittain," was the reply.
"That sounds familiar," said Mr. Brittain--it being, indeed, his own name.
"Yas, sah. Ah'm the son of yo' ol' mammy."
In short, Marion Luther had grown up on the old plantation; it was the
spirit of the hereditary vassal demanding the protection and support of
the hereditary baron, and he got it, of course.
The Negro who makes his appeal on the basis of this old relationship
finds no more indulgent or generous friend than the Southern white man,
indulgent to the point of excusing thievery and other petty offences, but
the moment he assumes or demands any other relationship or stands up as an
independent citizen, the white men--at least some white men--turn upon him
with the fiercest hostility. The incident of the associated charities may
now be understood. It was not necessarily cruelty to a cold or hungry
Negro that inspired the demand of the irate subscriber, but the feeling
that the associated charities helped Negroes and whites on the same basis,
as men; that, therefore, it encouraged "social equality," and that,
therefore, it was to be stopped.
Most of the examples so far given are along the line of social contact,
where, of course, the repulsion is intense. Negroes and whites can go to
different schools, churches, and saloons, and sit in different street
cars, and still live pretty comfortably. But the longer I remain in the
South, the more clearly I come to understand how wide and deep, in other,
less easily discernible ways, the chasm between the races is becoming.
_The New Racial Consciousness Among Negroes_
One of the natural and inevitable results of the effort of the white man
to set the Negro off, as a race, by himself, is to awaken in him a new
consciousness--a sort of racial consciousness. It drives the Negroes
together for defence and offence. Many able Negroes, some largely of white
blood, cut off from all opportunity of success in the greater life of the
white man, become of necessity leaders of their own people. And one of
their chief efforts consists in urging Negroes to work together and to
stand together. In this they are only developing the instinct of defence
against the white man which has always been latent in the race. This
instinct exhibits itself in the way in which the mass of Negroes sometimes
refuse to turn over a criminal of their colour to white justice; it is
like the instinctive clannishness of the Highland Scotch or the peasant
Irish. I don't know how many Southern people have told me in different
ways of how extremely difficult it is to get at the real feeling of a
Negro, to make him tell what goes on in his clubs and churches or in his
innumerable societies.
A Southern woman told me of a cook who had been in her service for
nineteen years. The whole family really loved the old servant: her
mistress made her a confidant, in the way of the old South, in the most
intimate private and family matters, the daughters told her their love
affairs; they all petted her and even submitted to many small tyrannies
upon her part.
"But do you know," said my hostess, "Susie never tells us a thing about
her life or her friends, and we couldn't, if we tried, make her tell what
goes on in the society she belongs to."
The Negro has long been defensively secretive. Slavery made him that. In
the past, the instinct was passive and defensive; but with growing
education and intelligent leadership it is rapidly becoming conscious,
self-directive and offensive. And right there, it seems to me, lies the
great cause of the increased strain in the South.
Let me illustrate. In the People's Tabernacle in Atlanta, where thousands
of Negroes meet every Sunday, I saw this sign in huge letters:
FOR PHOTOGRAPHS, GO TO AUBURN PHOTO
GALLERY OPERATED BY COLOURED MEN
The old-fashioned Negro preferred to go to the white man for everything;
he didn't trust his own people; the new Negro, with growing race
consciousness, and feeling that the white man is against him, urges his
friends to patronise Negro doctors and dentists, and to trade with Negro
storekeepers. The extent to which this movement has gone was one of the
most surprising things that I, as an unfamiliar Northerner, found in
Atlanta. In other words, the struggle of the races is becoming more and
more rapidly economic.
_Story of a Negro Shoe-store_
One day, walking in Broad Street, I passed a Negro shoe-store. I did not
know that there was such a thing in the country. I went in to make
inquiries. It was neat, well kept, and evidently prosperous. I found that
it was owned by a stock company, organised and controlled wholly by
Negroes; the manager was a brisk young mulatto named Harper, a graduate of
Atlanta University. I found him dictating to a Negro girl stenographer.
There were two reasons, he said, why the store had been opened; one was
because the promoters thought it a good business opportunity, and the
other was because many Negroes of the better class felt that they did not
get fair treatment at white stores. At some places--not all, he said--when
a Negro woman went to buy a pair of shoes, the clerk would hand them to
her without offering to help her try them on; and a Negro was always kept
waiting until all the white people in the store had been served. Since the
new business was opened, he said, it had attracted much of the Negro
trade; all the leaders advising their people to patronise him. I was much
interested to find out how this young man looked upon the race question.
His first answer struck me forcibly, for it was the universal and typical
answer of the business man the world over whether white, yellow, or black:
"All I want," he said, "is to be protected and let alone, so that I can
build up this business."
"What do you mean by protection?" I asked.
"Well, justice between the races. That doesn't mean social equality. We
have a society of our own, and that is all we want. If he can have justice
in the courts, and fair protection, we can learn to compete with the white
stores and get along all right."
Such an enterprise as this indicates the new, economic separation between
the races.
"Here is business," says the Negro, "which I am going to do."
Considering the fact that only a few years ago, the Negro did no business
at all, and had no professional men, it is really surprising to a
Northerner to see what progress he has made. One of the first lines he
took up was--not unnaturally--the undertaking business. Some of the most
prosperous Negroes in every Southern city are undertakers, doing work
exclusively, of course, for coloured people. Other early enterprises,
growing naturally out of a history of personal service, were barbering
and tailoring. Atlanta has many small Negro tailor and clothes-cleaning
shops.
_Wealthiest Negro in Atlanta_
The wealthiest Negro in Atlanta, A. F. Herndon, operates the largest
barber shop in the city; he is the president of a Negro insurance company
(of which there are four in the city) and he owns and rents some fifty
dwelling houses. He is said to be worth $80,000, all made, of course,
since slavery.
Another occupation developing naturally from the industrial training of
slavery was the business of the building contractor. Several such Negroes,
notably Alexander Hamilton, do a considerable business in Atlanta, and
have made money. They are employed by white men, and they hire for their
jobs both white and Negro workmen.
Small groceries and other stores are of later appearance; I saw at least a
score of them in various parts of Atlanta. For the most part they are very
small, many are exceedingly dirty and ill-kept; usually much poorer than
corresponding places kept by foreigners, indiscriminately called "Dagoes"
down here, who are in reality mostly Russian Jews and Greeks. But there
are a few Negro grocery stores in Atlanta which are highly creditable.
Other business enterprises include restaurants (for Negroes), printing
establishments, two newspapers, and several drug-stores. In other words,
the Negro is rapidly building up his own business enterprises, tending to
make himself independent as a race.
The appearance of Negro drug-stores was the natural result of the
increasing practice of Negro doctors and dentists. Time was when all
Negroes preferred to go to white practitioners, but since educated
coloured doctors became common, they have taken a very large
part--practically all, I am told--of the practice in Atlanta. Several of
them have had degrees from Northern universities, two from Yale; and one
of them, at least, has some little practice among white people. The
doctors are leaders among their people. Naturally they give prescriptions
to be filled by druggists of their own race; hence the growth of the drug
business among Negroes everywhere in the South. The first store to be
established in Atlanta occupies an old wooden building in Auburn Avenue.
It is operated by Moses Amos, a mulatto, and enjoys, I understand, a high
degree of prosperity. I visited it. A post-office occupies one corner of
the room; and it is a familiar gathering place for coloured men. Moses
Amos told me his story, and I found it so interesting, and so significant
of the way in which Negro business men have come up, that I am setting it
down briefly here.
_Rise of a Negro Druggist_
"I never shall forget," he said, "my first day in the drug business. It
was in 1876. I remember I was with a crowd of boys in Peachtree Street,
where Dr. Huss, a Southern white man, kept a drug-store. The old doctor
was sitting out in front smoking his pipe. He called one little Negro
after another, and finally chose me. He said:
"'I want you to live with me, work in the store, and look after my horse.'
"He sent me to his house and told me to tell his wife to give me some
breakfast, and I certainly delivered the first message correctly. His
wife, who was a noble lady, not only fed me, but made me take a bath in a
sure enough porcelain tub, the first I had ever seen. When I went back to
the store, I was so regenerated that the doctor had to adjust his
spectacles before he knew me. He said to me:
"'You can wash bottles, put up castor oil, salts and turpentine, sell
anything you _know_ and put the money in the drawer.'
"He showed me how to work the keys of the cash drawer. 'I am going to
trust you,' he said. 'Don't steal from me; if you want anything ask for
it, and you can have it. And don't lie; I hate a liar. A boy who will lie
will steal, too.'
"I remained with Dr. Huss thirteen years. He sent me to school and paid my
tuition out of his own pocket; he trusted me fully, often leaving me in
charge of his business for weeks at a time. When he died I formed a
partnership with Dr. Butler, Dr. Slater, and others, and bought the store.
Our business grew and prospered, so that within a few years we had a stock
worth $3,000, and cash of $800. That made us ambitious. We bought land,
built a new store, and went into debt to do it. We didn't know much about
business--that's the Negro's chief trouble--and we lost trade by changing
our location, so that in spite of all we could do, we failed and lost
everything, though we finally paid our creditors every cent. After many
trials we started again in 1896 in our present store; to-day we are doing
a good business; we can get all the credit we want from wholesale houses,
we employ six clerks, and pay good interest on the capital invested."
_Greatest Difficulties Met by Negro Business Men_
I asked him what was the greatest difficulty he had to meet. He said it
was the credit system; the fact that many Negroes have not learned
financial responsibility. Once, he said, he nearly stopped business on
this account.
"I remember," he said, "the last time we got into trouble. We needed $400
to pay our bills. I picked out some of our best customers and gave them a
heart-to-heart talk and told them what trouble we were in. They all
promised to pay; but on the day set for payment, out of $1,680 which they
owed us we collected just $8.25. After that experience we came down to a
cash basis. We trust no one, and since then we have been doing well."
He said he thought the best opportunity for Negro development was in the
South where he had his whole race behind him. He said he had once been
tempted to go North looking for an opening.
"How did you make out?" I asked.
"Well, I'll tell you," he said, "when I got there I wanted a shave; I
walked the streets two hours visiting barber shops, and they all turned me
away with some excuse. I finally had to buy a razor and shave myself! That
was just a sample. I came home disgusted and decided to fight it out down
here where I understood conditions."
Of course only a comparatively few Negroes are able to get ahead in
business. They must depend almost exclusively on the trade of their own
race, and they must meet the highly organised competition of white men.
But it is certainly significant that even a few are able to make progress
along these unfamiliar lines. Many Southern men I met had little or no
idea of the remarkable extent of this advancement among the better class
of Negroes. Here is a strange thing. I don't know how many Southern men
have prefaced their talks with me with words something like this:
"You can't expect to know the Negro after a short visit. You must live
down here like we do. Now, I know the Negroes like a book. I was brought
up with them. I know what they'll do and what they won't do. I have had
Negroes in my house all my life."
But curiously enough I found that these men rarely knew anything about the
better class of Negroes--those who were in business, or in independent
occupations, those who owned their own homes. They _did_ come into contact
with the servant Negro, the field hand, the common labourer, who make up,
of course, the great mass of the race. On the other hand, the best class
of Negroes did not know the higher class of white people, and based their
suspicion and hatred upon the acts of the poorer sort of whites with whom
they naturally came into contact. The best elements of the two races are
as far apart as though they lived in different continents; and that is one
of the chief causes of the growing danger of the Southern situation. It is
a striking fact that one of the first--almost instinctive--efforts at
reconstruction after the Atlanta riot was to bring the best elements of
both races together, so that they might, by becoming acquainted and
gaining confidence in each other, allay suspicion and bring influence to
bear upon the lawless elements of both white people and coloured.
Many Southerners look back wistfully to the faithful, simple, ignorant,
obedient, cheerful, old plantation Negro and deplore his disappearance.
They want the New South, but the old Negro. That Negro is disappearing
forever along with the old feudalism and the old-time exclusively
agricultural life.
A new Negro is not less inevitable than a new white man and a new South.
And the new Negro, as my clever friend says, doesn't laugh as much as the
old one. It is grim business he is in, this being free, this new, fierce
struggle in the open competitive field for the daily loaf. Many go down to
vagrancy and crime in that struggle; a few will rise. The more rapid the
progress (with the trained white man setting the pace), the more frightful
the mortality.
CHAPTER III
THE SOUTHERN CITY NEGRO
After my arrival in Atlanta, and when I had begun to understand some of
the more superficial ramifications of the colour line (as I related in the
last chapter,) I asked several Southern men whose acquaintance I had made
where I could best see the poorer or criminal class of Negroes. So much
has been said of the danger arising from this element of Southern
population and it plays such a part in every discussion of the race
question that I was anxious to learn all I could about it.
"Go down any morning to Judge Broyles's court," they said to me, "and
you'll see the lowest of the low."
So I went down--the first of many visits I made to police and justice
courts. I chose a Monday morning that I might see to the best advantage
the accumulation of the arrests of Saturday and Sunday.
The police station stands in Decatur Street, in the midst of the very
worst section of the city, surrounded by low saloons, dives, and
pawn-shops. The court occupies a great room upstairs, and it was crowded
that morning to its capacity. Besides the police, lawyers, court officers,
and white witnesses, at least one hundred and fifty spectators filled the
seats behind the rail, nearly all of them Negroes. The ordinary Negro
loves nothing better than to sit and watch the proceedings of a court.
Judge Broyles kindly invited me to a seat on the platform at his side
where I could look into the faces of the prisoners and hear all that was
said.
_In a Southern Police Court_
It was a profoundly interesting and significant spectacle. In the first
place the very number of cases was staggering. The docket that morning
carried over one hundred names--men, women, and children, white and
black; the court worked hard, but it was nearly two o'clock in the
afternoon before the room was cleared. Atlanta, as I showed in a former
chapter, has the largest number of arrests, considering the population, of
any important city in the United States. I found that 13,511 of the total
of 21,702 persons arrested in 1906 were Negroes, or 62 per cent., whereas
the coloured population of the city is only 40 per cent. of the total.[2]
A very large proportion of the arrests that Monday morning were Negroes,
with a surprising proportion of women and of mere children. In 1906 3,194
Negro women were arrested in Atlanta. It was altogether a pitiful and
disheartening exhibition, a spectacle of sodden ignorance, reckless vice,
dissipation. Most of the cases, ravelled out, led back to the saloon.
"Where's your home?" the judge would ask, and in a number of cases the
answer was:
"Ah come here fum de country."
Over and over again it was the story of the country Negro, or the Negro
who had been working on the railroad, in the cotton fields or in the
sawmills, who had entered upon the more complex life of the city. Most of
the country districts of the South prohibit the sale of liquor; and
Negroes, especially, have comparatively little temptation of this nature,
nor are they subjected to the many other glittering pitfalls of city life.
But of late years the opportunities of the city have attracted the black
people, just as they have the whites, in large numbers. Atlanta had many
saloons and other places of vice; and the results are to be seen in Judge
Broyles's court any morning. And not only Negroes, but the "poor whites"
who have come in from the mountains and the small farms to work in the
mills: they, too, suffer fully as much as the Negroes.
_Negro Cocaine Victims_
Not a few of the cases both black and white showed evidences of cocaine or
morphine poisoning--the blear eyes, the unsteady nerves.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF A NEGRO WORKINGMAN'S HOME, ATLANTA, GEORGIA]
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF A NEGRO HOME OF THE POOREST SORT IN
INDIANAPOLIS]
"What's the trouble here?" asked the judge.
"Coke," said the officer.
"Ten-seventy-five," said the judge, naming the amount of the fine.
They buy the "coke" in the form of a powder and snuff it up the nose; a
certain patent catarrh medicine which is nearly all cocaine is sometimes
used; ten cents will purchase enough to make a man wholly irresponsible
for his acts, and capable of any crime. The cocaine habit, which seems to
be spreading, for there are always druggists who will break the law, has
been a curse to the Negro and has resulted, directly, as the police told
me, in much crime. I was told of two cases in particular, of offences
against women, in which the Negro was a victim of the drug habit.
So society, in pursuit of wealth, South and North, preys upon the ignorant
and weak--and then wonders why crime is prevalent!
One has only to visit police courts in the South to see in how many
curious ways the contact of the races generates fire.
"What's the trouble here?" inquires the judge.
The white complainant--a boy--says:
"This nigger insulted me!" and he tells the epithet the Negro applied.
"Did you call him that?"
"No sah, I never called him no such name."
"Three-seventy-five--you mustn't insult white people."
And here is the report of the case of a six-year-old Negro boy from the
_Georgian_:
Because Robert Lee Buster, a six-year-old Negro boy, insulted Maggie
McDermott, a little girl, who lives at 507 Simpson Street, Wednesday
afternoon, he was given a whipping in the police station Thursday
morning that will make him remember to be good.
The case was heard in the juvenile court before Judge Broyles. It was
shown that the little Negro had made an insulting remark to the
little girl.
_Story of a Negro Arrest_
The very suspicion and fear that exist give rise to many difficulties. One
illuminating case came up that morning. A strapping Negro man was brought
before the judge. He showed no marks of dissipation and was respectably
dressed. Confronting him were two plain-clothes policemen, one with his
neck wrapped up, one with a bandage around his arm. Both said they had
been stabbed by the Negro with a jack-knife. The Negro said he was a hotel
porter and he had the white manager of the hotel in court to testify to
his good character, sobriety, and industry. It seems that he was going
home from work at nine o'clock in the evening, and it was dark. He said he
was afraid and had been afraid since the riot. At the same time the two
policemen were looking for a burglar. They saw the Negro porter and
ordered him to stop. Not being in uniform the Negro said he thought the
officers were "jes' plain white men" who were going to attack him. When he
started to run the officers tried to arrest him, and he drew his
jack-knife and began to fight. And here he was in court! The judge said:
"You mustn't attack officers," and bound him over to trial in the higher
court.
_A White Man and a Negro Woman_
Another case shows one of the strange relationships which grow out of
Southern conditions. An old white man, much agitated and very pale, was
brought before the judge. With him came a much younger, comely appearing
woman. Both were well dressed and looked respectable--so much so, indeed,
that there was a stir of interest and curiosity among the spectators. Why
had they been arrested? As they stood in front of the judge's desk, the
old man hung his head, but the woman looked up with such an expression,
tearless and tragic, as I hope I shall not have to see again.
"What's the charge?" asked the judge.
"Adultery," said the officer.
The woman winced, the old man did not look up.
The judge glanced from one to the other in surprise.
"Why don't you get married?" he asked.
"The woman," said the officer, "is a nigger."
She was as white as I am, probably an octoroon; I could not have
distinguished her from a white person, and she deceived even the
experienced eye of the judge.
"Is that so?" asked the judge.
The man continued to hang his head, the woman looked up; neither said a
word. It then came out that they had lived together as man and wife for
many years and that they had children nearly grown. One of the girls--and
a very bright, ambitious girl--as I learned later, was a student in
Atlanta University, a Negro college, where she was supported by her
father, who made good wages as a telegraph operator. Some neighbour had
complained and the man and woman were arrested.
"Is this all true?" asked the judge.
Neither said a word.
"You can't marry under the Georgia law," said the judge; "I'll have to
bind you over for trial in the county court."
They were led back to the prisoners' rooms. A few minutes later the
bailiff came out quickly and said to the judge:
"The old man has fallen in a faint."
Not long afterward they half led, half carried him out across the court
room.
One thing impressed me especially, not only in this court but in all
others I have visited: a Negro brought in for drunkenness, for example,
was punished much more severely than a white man arrested for the same
offence. The injustice which the weak everywhere suffer--North and
South--is in the South visited upon the Negro. The white man sometimes
escaped with a reprimand, he was sometimes fined three dollars and costs,
but the Negro, especially if he had no white man to intercede for him, was
usually punished with a ten or fifteen dollar fine, which often meant that
he must go to the chain-gang. One of the chief causes of complaint by the
Negroes of Atlanta has been of the rough treatment of the police and of
unjust arrests. After the riot, when the Civic League, composed of the
foremost white citizens of Atlanta, was organised, one of the first
subjects that came up was that of justice to the Negro. Mr. Hopkins, the
leader of the League, said to me: "We complain that the Negroes will not
help to bring the criminals of their race to justice. One reason for that
is that the Negro has too little confidence in our courts. We must give
him that, above all things."
In accordance with this plan, the Civic League, heartily supported by
Judge Broyles, employed a young lawyer, Mr. Underwood, to appear
regularly in court and look after the interests of Negroes.
_Convicts Making a Profit for Georgia_
One reason for the very large number of arrests--in Georgia
particularly--lies in the fact that the state and the counties make a
profit out of their prison system. No attempt is ever made to reform a
criminal, either white or coloured. Convicts are hired out to private
contractors or worked on the public roads. Last year the net profit to
Georgia from its chain-gangs, to which the prison commission refers with
pride, reached the great sum of $354,853.55.
Of course a very large proportion of the prisoners are Negroes. The demand
for convicts by rich sawmill operators, owners of brick-yards, large
farmers, and others is far in advance of the supply. The natural tendency
is to convict as many men as possible--it furnishes steady, cheap labour
to the contractors and a profit to the state. Undoubtedly this explains in
some degree the very large number of criminals, especially Negroes, in
Georgia. One of the leading political forces in Atlanta is a very
prominent banker who is a dominant member of the city police board. He is
also the owner of extensive brick-yards near Atlanta, where many convicts
are employed. Some of the large fortunes in Atlanta have come chiefly from
the labour of chain-gangs of convicts leased from the state.
_Fate of the Black Boy_
As I have already suggested, one of the things that impressed me strongly
in visiting Judge Broyles's court--and others like it--was the astonishing
number of children, especially Negroes, arrested. Some of them were very
young and often exceedingly bright-looking. From the records I find that
in 1906 1 boy six years old, 7 of seven years, 33 of eight years, 69 of
nine years, 107 of ten years, 142 of eleven years, and 219 of twelve years
were arrested and brought into court--in other words, 578 boys and girls,
mostly Negroes, under twelve years of age!
"I should think," I said to a police officer, "you would have trouble in
taking care of all these children in your reformatories."
"Reformatories!" he said, "there aren't any."
"What do you do with them?"
"Well, if they're bad we put 'em in the stockade or the chain-gang,
otherwise they're turned loose."
I found, however, that a new state juvenile reformatory was just being
opened at Milledgeville--which may accommodate a few Negro boys. An
attempt is also being made in Atlanta to get hold of some of the children
through a new probation system. I talked with the excellent officer, Mr.
Gloer, who works in conjunction with Judge Broyles. He reaches a good many
white boys, but very few Negroes. Of 1,011 boys and girls under sixteen,
arrested in 1905, 819 were black, but of those given the advantage of the
probation system, 50 were white and only 7 coloured. In other words, out
of 819 arrests of Negro children only 7 enjoyed the benefit of the
probation system.
Mr. Gloer has endeavoured to secure a coloured assistant who would help
look after the swarming Negro children who are becoming criminals. The
city refused to appropriate money for that purpose, but some of the
leading coloured citizens agreed to contribute one dollar a month each,
and a Negro woman was employed to help with the coloured children brought
into court. Excellent work was done, but owing to the feeling after the
riot the Negro assistant discontinued her work.
_Care of Negro Orphans_
With many hundreds of Negro orphans, waifs, and foundlings, the state or
city does very little to help them. If it were not for the fact that the
Negroes, something like the Jews, are wonderfully helpful to one another,
adopting orphan children with the greatest willingness, there would be
much suffering. Several orphanages in the state are conducted by the
coloured people themselves, either through their churches or by private
subscription. In Atlanta the Carrie Steele orphanage, which is managed by
Negroes, has received an appropriation yearly from the city, and has taken
children sent by the city charities department. After the riot the
appropriation was suddenly cut off without explanation, but through the
activities of the new Civic League, it was, I understand, restored.
Without proper reformatories or asylums, with small advantage of the
probation system, hundreds of Negro children are on the streets of Atlanta
every day--shooting craps, stealing, learning to drink. A few, shut up in
the stockade, or in chain-gangs, without any attempt to reform them or
teach them, take lessons in crime from older offenders and come out worse
than they went in. They spread abroad the lawlessness they learn and
finally commit some frightful crime and get back into the chain-gang for
life--where they make a profit for the state!
Every child, white or coloured, is getting an education somewhere. If that
education is not in schools, or at home, or, in cases of incorrigibility,
in proper reformatories, then it is on the streets or in chain-gangs.
_Why Negro Children Are Not in School_
My curiosity, aroused by the very large number of young prisoners, led me
next to inquire why these children were not in school. I visited a number
of schools and I talked with L. M. Landrum, the assistant superintendent.
Compulsory education is not enforced anywhere in the South, so that
children may run the streets unless their parents insist upon sending them
to school. I found more than this, however, that Atlanta did not begin to
have enough school facilities for the children who wanted to go. Like many
rapidly growing cities, both South and North, it has been difficult to
keep up with the demand. Just as in the North the tenement classes are
often neglected, so in the South the lowest class--which is the Negro--is
neglected. Several new schools have been built for white children, but
there has been no new school for coloured children in fifteen or twenty
years (though one Negro private school has been taken over within the last
few years by the city). So crowded are the coloured schools that they have
two sessions a day, one squad of children coming in the forenoon, another
in the afternoon. The coloured teachers, therefore, do double work, for
which they receive about two-thirds as much salary as the white teachers.
Though many Southern cities have instituted industrial training in the
public schools, Atlanta so far has done nothing. The president of the
board of education in his last published report (1903) calls attention to
this fact, and says also:
While on the subject of Negro schools, permit me to call your
attention to their overcrowded condition. In every Negro school many
teachers teach two sets of pupils, each set for one-half of a school
day.
The last bond election was carried by a majority of only thirty-three
votes. To my personal knowledge more than thirty-three Negroes voted
for the bonds on the solemn assurance that by the passage of the
bonds the Negro children would receive more school accommodations.
The eagerness of the coloured people for a chance to send their children
to school is something astonishing and pathetic. They will submit to all
sorts of inconveniences in order that their children may get an education.
One day I visited the mill neighbourhood of Atlanta to see how the poorer
classes of white people lived. I found one very comfortable home occupied
by a family of mill employees. They hired a Negro woman to cook for them,
and while they sent their children to the mill to work, the cook sent her
children to school!
_How Negroes Educate Themselves_
Here is a curious and significant thing I found in Atlanta. Because there
is not enough room for Negro children in public schools, the coloured
people maintain many private schools. The largest of these, called Morris
Brown College, has nearly 1,000 pupils. Some of them are boarders from the
country, but the greater proportion are day pupils from seven years old up
who come in from the neighbourhood. This "college," in reality a grammar
school, is managed and largely supported by tuition and contributions from
Negroes, though some subscriptions are obtained in the North. Besides this
"college" there are many small private schools conducted by Negro women
and supported wholly by the tuition paid--the Negroes thus voluntarily
taxing themselves heavily for their educational opportunities. One
afternoon in Atlanta I passed a small, rather dilapidated home. Just as I
reached the gate I heard a great cackling of voices and much laughter.
Coloured children began to pour out of the house. "What's this?" I said,
and I turned in to see. I found a Negro woman, the teacher, standing in
the doorway. She had just dismissed her pupils for recess. She was holding
school in two little rooms where some fifty children must have been
crowded to suffocation. Everything was very primitive and
inconvenient--but it was a school! She collected, she told me, a dollar a
month tuition for each child. Mollie McCue's school, perhaps the best
known private school for Negroes in the city, has 250 pupils.
Many children also find educational opportunities in the Negro colleges of
the city--Clark University, Atlanta University and Spellman Seminary,
which are supported partly by the Negroes themselves but mostly by
Northern philanthropy.
Mr. Landrum gave me a copy of the last statistical report of the school
board (1903), from which these facts appear:
School No. of With Without
Population Schools Teachers Seats Seats
White 14,465 20 200 10,052 4,413
Coloured 8,118 5 49 2,445 5,673
Even with a double daily session for coloured pupils nearly half of the
Negro children in Atlanta, even in 1903, were barred from the public
schools from lack of facilities, and the number has increased largely in
the last four years. Some of these are accommodated in the private schools
and colleges which I have mentioned, but there still remain hundreds, even
thousands, who are getting no schooling of any kind, but who are
nevertheless being educated--on the streets, and for criminal lives.
_White Instruction for Black Children_
I made a good many inquiries to find out what was being done outside of
the public schools by the white people toward training the Negro either
morally, industrially or intellectually--and I was astonished to find that
it was next to nothing. The Negro is, of course, not welcome at the white
churches or Sunday schools, and the sentiment is so strong against
teaching the Negro that it is a brave Southern man or woman, indeed, who
dares attempt anything of the sort. I did find, however, that the Central
Presbyterian Church of Atlanta conducted a Negro Sunday School. Of this
Dr. Theron H. Rice, the pastor, said:
"The Sunday School conducted in Atlanta by my church is the outcome of the
effort of some of the most earnest and thoughtful of our people to give
careful religious training to the Negroes of this generation and thus to
conserve the influence begun with the fathers and mothers and the
grandfathers and grandmothers of these coloured children when they were
taught personally by their devoted Christian masters and mistresses. The
work is small in point of the number reached, but it has been productive
of sturdy character and law-abiding citizenship."
A white man or woman, and especially a Northern white man or woman, in
Atlanta who teaches Negroes is rigorously ostracised by white society. I
visited one of the Negro colleges where there are a number of white
teachers from the North. We had quite a talk. When I came to leave one of
the teachers said to me:
"You don't know how good it seems to talk with some one from the outside
world. We work here year in and year out without a white visitor, except
those who have some necessary business with the institution."
Explaining the attitude toward these Northern teachers (and we must
understand just how the Southern people feel in this matter), a prominent
clergyman said that a lady who made a social call upon a teacher in that
institution would not feel secure against having to meet Negroes socially
and that when the call was returned a similar embarrassing situation might
be created.
_Apologising for Helping Negroes_
Just in this connection: I found a very remarkable and significant letter
published in the Orangeburg, S. C., _News_, signed by a well-to-do white
citizen who thus apologises for a kind act to a Negro school:
I had left my place of business here on a business trip a few miles
below, on returning I came by the above-mentioned school (the Prince
Institute, coloured), and was held up by the teacher and begged to
make a few remarks to the children. Very reluctantly I did so, not
thinking that publicity would be given to it or that I was doing
anything that would offend anyone. I wish to say here and now that I
am heartily sorry for what I did, and I hope after this humble
confession and expression of regret that all whom I have offended
will forgive me.
The sentiment indicated by this letter, while widely prevalent, is by no
means universal. I have seen Southern white men address Negro schools and
Negro gatherings many times since I have been down here. Some of the
foremost men in the South have accepted Booker T. Washington's invitations
to speak at Tuskegee. And concerning the very letter that I reproduce
above, the _Charlotte Observer_, a strong Southern newspaper, which copied
it, said:
A man would better be dead than to thus abase himself. This man did
right to address the pupils of a coloured school, but has spoiled all
by apologising for it. Few people have conceived that race prejudice
went so far, even in South Carolina, as is here indicated. Logically
it is to be assumed that this jelly-fish was about to be put under
the ban, and to secure exemption from this, published this abject
card. To it was appended a certificate from certain citizens, saying
they 'are as anxious to see the coloured race elevated as any people,
but by all means let it be done inside the colour line.'... The
narrowness and malignity betrayed in this Orangeburg incident is
exceedingly unworthy, and those guilty of it should be ashamed of
themselves.
The Rev. H. S. Bradley, for a long time one of the leading clergymen of
Atlanta, now of St. Louis, said in a sermon published in the Atlanta
_Constitution_:
... We have not been wholly lacking in our effort to help. There are
a few schools and churches supported by Southern whites for the
Negroes. Here and there a man like George Williams Walker, of the
aristocracy of South Carolina, and a woman like Miss Belle H.
Bennett, of the blue blood of Kentucky, goes as teacher to the Negro
youth, and seeks in a Christly spirit of fraternity to bring them to
a higher plane of civil and moral manhood, but the number like them
can almost be counted on fingers of both hands.
Our Southern churches have spent probably a hundred times as much
money since the Civil War in an effort to evangelise the people of
China, Japan, India, South America, Africa, Mexico, and Cuba, as they
have spent to give the Gospel to the Negroes at our doors. It is
often true that opportunity is overlooked because it lies at our
feet.
_Concerning the Vagrant Negro_
Before I get away from observations of the low-class Negro, I must speak
of the subject of vagrancy. Many white men have told me with impatience of
the great number of idle or partly idle Negroes--idle while every industry
and most of the farming districts of Georgia are crying for more labour.
And from my observation in Atlanta, I should say that there were good many
idle or partly idle Negroes--even after the riot, which served, I
understand, to drive many of them away. Five days before the riot of last
September, a committee of the city council visited some forty saloons one
afternoon, and by actual count found 2,455 Negroes (and 152 white men)
drinking at the bars or lounging around the doorways. In some of these
saloons--conducted by white men and permitted to exist by the city
authorities--pictures of nude white women were displayed as an added
attraction. Has this anything to do with Negro crimes against white women?
After the riot these conditions in Atlanta were much improved and in
January, 1908, all the saloons were closed.
Increased Negro idleness is the result, in large measure, of the
marvellous and rapid changes in Southern conditions. The South has been
and is to-day dependent on a single labour supply--the Negro. Now Negroes,
though recruited by a high birth rate, have not been increasing in any
degree as rapidly as the demand for labour incident to the development of
every sort of industry, railroads, lumbering, mines, to say nothing of the
increased farm area and the added requirements of growing cities. With
this enormous increased demand for labour the Negro supply has,
relatively, been decreasing. Many have gone North and West, many have
bought farms of their own, thousands, by education, have became
professional men, teachers, preachers, and even merchants and
bankers--always draining away the best and most industrious men of the
race and reducing by so much the available supply of common labour. In
short, those Negroes who were capable have been going the same way as the
unskilled Irishman and German in the North--upward through the door of
education--but, unlike the North, there have been no other labourers
coming in to take their places.
What has been the result? Naturally a fierce contest between agriculture
and industry for the limited and dwindling supply of the only labour they
had.
_Negro Monopoly on Labour_
So they bid against one another--it was as though the Negro had a monopoly
on labour--and within the last few years day wages for Negro workers have
jumped from fifty or sixty cents to $1.25 and $1.50, often more--a pure
matter of competition. A similar advance has affected all sorts of servant
labour--cooks, waiters, maids, porters.
High wages, scarcity of labour, and the consequent loss of opportunity for
taking advantage of the prevailing prosperity would, in any community,
South or North, whether the labour was white or black, produce a spirit of
impatience and annoyance on the part of the employing class. I found it
evident enough last summer in Kansas where the farmers were unable to get
workers to save their crops; and the servant problem is not more
provoking, certainly, in the South than in the North and West. Indeed, it
is the labour problem more than any other one cause, that has held the
South back and is holding it back to-day.
But the South has an added cause of annoyance. Higher wages, instead of
producing more and better labour, as they would naturally be expected to
do, have actually served to reduce the supply. This may, at first, seem
paradoxical: but it is easily explainable and it lies deep down beneath
many of the perplexities which surround the race problem.
Most Negroes, as I have said, were (and still are, of course)
farm-dwellers, and farm-dwellers in the hitherto wasteful Southern way.
Their living is easy to get and very simple. In that warm climate they
need few clothes; a shack for a home. Their living standards are low; they
have not learned to save; there has not been time since slavery for them
to attain the sense of responsibility which would encourage them to get
ahead. And moreover they have been and are to-day largely under the
discipline of white land owners.
What was the effect, then, of a rapid advance in wages? The poorer class
of Negroes, naturally indolent and happy-go-lucky, found that they could
make as much money in two or three days as they had formerly earned in a
whole week. It was enough to live on as well as they had ever lived: why,
then, work more than two days a week? It was the logic of a child, but it
was the logic used. Everywhere I went in the South I heard the same story:
high wages coupled with the difficulty of getting anything like continuous
work from this class of coloured men.
On the other hand the better and more industrious Negroes, who would work
continuously--and there are unnumbered thousands of them, as faithful as
any workers--occasionally saved their surplus, bought little farms or
businesses of their own and began to live on a better scale. One of the
first things they did after getting their footing was to take their wives
and daughters out of the white man's kitchen, and to send their children
from the cotton fields (where the white man needed them) to the
school-house where the tendency (exactly as with white children) was to
educate them away from farm employment. With the development of ambition
and a higher standard of living, the Negro follows the steps of the rising
Irishman or Italian: he has a better home, he wants his wife to take care
of it, and he insists upon the education of his children.
In this way higher wages have tended to cut down the already limited
supply of labour, producing annoyance, placing greater obstacles in the
way of that material development of which the Southerner is so justly
proud. And this, not at all unnaturally, has given rise on the one hand to
complaints against the lazy Negro who will work only two days in the week
that he may loaf the other five; and on the other hand it has found
expression in blind and bitter hostility to the education which enables
the better sort of Negro to rise above the unskilled employment and the
domestic service of which the South is so keenly in need. It is human
nature to blame men, not conditions. Here is unlimited work to do: here is
the Negro who has been for centuries and is to-day depended upon to do it;
it is not done. The natural result is to throw the blame wholly upon the
Negro, and not upon the deep economic conditions and tendencies which have
actually caused the scarcity of labour.
_Immigrants to Take the Negroes' Places_
But within the last year or two thinking men in the South have begun to
see this particular root of the difficulty and a great new movement
looking to the encouragement of immigration from foreign countries has
been started. In November, 1906, the first shipload of immigrants ever
brought from Europe directly to a South Carolina port were landed at
Charleston with great ceremony and rejoicing. If a steady stream of
immigrants can be secured and if they can be employed on satisfactory
terms with the Negro it will go far toward relieving race tension in the
South.
Of course idleness leads to crime, and one of the present efforts in the
South is toward a more rigid enforcement of laws against vagrancy. In this
the white people have the sympathy of the leading Negroes. I was struck
with one passage in the discussion at the last Workers' Conference at
Tuskegee. William E. Holmes, president of a coloured college at Macon,
Georgia, was speaking. Some one interrupted him:
"I would like to ask if you think the Negro is any more disposed to become
a loafer or vagrant than any other people under the same conditions?"
"Well," said Mr. Holmes, taking a deep breath, "we cannot afford to do
what other races do. We haven't a single, solitary man or woman among us
we can afford to support as an idler. It may be that other races have made
so much progress that they can afford to support loafers. But we are not
yet in that condition. Some of us have the impression that the world owes
us a living. That is a misfortune. I must confess that I have become
convinced that at the present time we furnish a larger number of loafers
than any other race of people on this continent."
These frank remarks did not meet with the entire approval of the members
of the conference, but the discussion seemed to indicate that there was a
great deal more of truth in them than the leaders and teachers of the
Negro are disposed to admit.
_The Worthless Negro_
I tried to see as much as I could of this "worthless Negro," who is about
the lowest stratum of humanity, it seems to me, of any in our American
life. He is usually densely ignorant, often a wanderer, working to-day
with a railroad gang, to-morrow on some city works, the next day picking
cotton. He has lost his white friends--his "white folks," as he calls
them--and he has not attained the training or self-direction to stand
alone. He works only when he is hungry, and he is as much a criminal as he
dares to be. Many such Negroes are supported by their wives or by women
with whom they live--for morality and the home virtues among this class
are unknown. A woman who works as a cook in a white family will often take
enough from the kitchen to feed a worthless vagabond of a man and keep him
in idleness--or worse. A Negro song exactly expresses this state of
beatitude:
"I doan has to work so ha'd
I's got a gal in a white man's ya'd;
Ebery night 'bout half pas' eight
I goes 'round to the white man's gate:
She brings me butter and she brings me la'd--
I doan has to work so ha'd!"
This worthless Negro, without training or education, grown up from the
neglected children I have already spoken of, evident in his idleness
around saloons and depots--this Negro provokes the just wrath of the
people, and gives a bad name to the entire Negro race. In numbers he is,
of course, small, compared with the 8,000,000 Negroes in the South, who
perform the enormous bulk of hard manual labour upon which rests Southern
prosperity.
_How the Working Negro Lives_
Above this low stratum of criminal or semi-criminal Negroes is a middle
class, comprising the great body of the race--the workers. They are
crowded into straggling settlements like Darktown and Jackson Row, a few
owning their homes, but the majority renting precariously, earning good
wages, harmless for the most part, but often falling into petty crime.
Poverty here, however, lacks the tragic note that it strikes in the
crowded sections of Northern cities. The temperament of the Negro is
irrepressibly cheerful, he overflows from his small home and sings and
laughs in his streets; no matter how ragged or forlorn he may be good
humour sits upon his countenance, and his squalour is not unpicturesque. A
banjo, a mullet supper from time to time, an exciting revival, give him
real joys. Most of the families of this middle class, some of whom are
deserted wives with children, have their "white folks" for whom they do
washing, cooking, gardening, or other service, and all have church
connections, so that they have a real place in the social fabric and a
certain code of self-respect.
I tried to see all I could of this phase of life. I visited many of the
poorer Negro homes and I was often received in squalid rooms with a
dignity of politeness which would have done credit to a society woman. For
the Negro, naturally, is a sort of Frenchman. And if I can sum up the many
visits I made in a single conclusion I should say, I think, that I was
chiefly impressed by the tragic punishment meted out to ignorance and
weakness by our complex society. I would find a home of one or two rooms
meanly furnished, but having in one corner a glittering cottage organ, or
on the mantel shelf a glorified gilt clock; crayon portraits,
inexpressibly crude and ugly, but framed gorgeously, are not uncommon--the
first uncertain, primitive (not unpitiful) reachings out after some of the
graces of a broader life. Many of these things are bought from agents and
the prices paid are extortionate. Often a Negro family will pay monthly
for a year or so on some showy clock or chromo or music-box or decorated
mirror--paying the value of it a dozen times over, only to have it seized
when through sickness, or lack of foresight, they fail to meet a single
note. Installment houses prey upon them, pawnbrokers suck their blood, and
they are infinitely the victims of patent medicines. It is rare, indeed,
that I entered a Negro cabin, even the poorest, without seeing one or more
bottles of some abominable cure-all. The amount yearly expended by Negroes
for patent medicines, which are glaringly advertised in all Southern
newspapers, must be enormous--millions of dollars. I had an interesting
side light on conditions one day while walking in one of the most
fashionable residence districts of Atlanta. I saw a magnificent gray-stone
residence standing somewhat back from the street. I said to my companion,
who was a resident of the city:
"That's a fine home."
"Yes; stop a minute," he said, "I want to tell you about that. The
anti-kink man lives there."
"Anti-kink?" I asked in surprise.
"Yes; the man who occupies that house is one of the wealthiest men here.
He made his money by selling to Negroes a preparation to smooth the kinks
out of their wool. They're simply crazy on that subject."
"Does it work?"
"You haven't seen any straight-haired Negroes, have you?" he asked.
Ignorance carries a big burden and climbs a rocky road!
_Old Mammies and Nurses_
The mass of coloured people still maintain, as I have said, a more or less
intimate connection with white families--frequently a very beautiful and
sympathetic relationship like that of the old mammies or nurses. To one
who has heard so much of racial hatred as I have since I have been down
here, a little incident that I observed the other day comes with a charm
hardly describable. I saw a carriage stop in front of a home. The expected
daughter had arrived--a very pretty girl indeed. She stepped out eagerly.
Her father was halfway down to the gate; but ahead of him was a very old
Negro woman in the cleanest of clean starched dresses.
"Honey," she said eagerly.
"Mammy!" exclaimed the girl, and the two rushed into each other's arms,
clasping and kissing--the white girl and the old black woman.
I thought to myself: "There's no Negro problem there: that's just plain
human love!"
_"Master" Superseded by "Boss"_
Often I have heard Negroes refer to "my white folks" and similarly the
white man still speaks of "my Negroes." The old term of slavery, the use
of the word "master," has wholly disappeared, and in its place has arisen,
not without significance, the round term "Boss," or sometimes "Cap," or
"Cap'n." To this the white man responds with the first name of the Negro,
"Jim" or "Susie"--or if the Negro is old or especially respected: "Uncle
Jim" or "Aunt Susan."
To an unfamiliar Northerner one of the very interesting and somewhat
amusing phases of conditions down here is the panic fear displayed over
the use of the word "Mr." or "Mrs." No Negro is ever called Mr. or Mrs. by
a white man; that would indicate social equality. A Southern white man
told me with humour of his difficulties:
"Now I admire Booker Washington. I regard him as a great man, and yet I
couldn't call him Mr. Washington. We were all in a quandary until a
doctor's degree was given him. That saved our lives! we all call him 'Dr.'
Washington now."
Sure enough! I don't think I have heard him called Mr. Washington since I
came down here. It is always "Dr." or just "Booker." They are ready to
call a Negro "Professor" or "Bishop" or "The Reverend"--but not "Mr."
In the same way a Negro may call Miss Mary Smith by the familiar "Miss
Mary," but if he called her Miss Smith she would be deeply incensed. The
formal "Miss Smith" would imply social equality.
I digress: but I have wanted to impress these relationships. There are all
gradations of Negroes between the wholly dependent old family servant and
the new, educated Negro professional or business man, and,
correspondingly, every degree of treatment from indulgence to intense
hostility.
I must tell, in spite of lack of room, one beautiful story I heard at
Atlanta, which so well illustrates the old relationship. There is in the
family of Dr. J. S. Todd, a well-known citizen of Atlanta, an old, old
servant called, affectionately, Uncle Billy. He has been so long in the
family that in reality he is served as much as he serves. During the riot
last September he was terrified: he did not dare to go home at night. So
Miss Louise, the doctor's daughter, took Uncle Billy home through the dark
streets. When she was returning one of her friends met her and was much
alarmed that she should venture out in a time of so much danger.
"What are you doing out here this time of night?" he asked.
"Why," she replied, as if it were the most natural answer in the world, "I
had to take Uncle Billy safely home."
Over against this story I want to reproduce a report from a Kentucky
newspaper which will show quite the other extreme:
_Tennessee Farmer Has Negro Bishop and His Wife Ejected from a
Sleeping Car_
Irvine McGraw, a Tennessee farmer, brought Kentucky's Jim Crow law
into prominent notice yesterday on an Illinois Central Pullman car.
When McGraw entered the car he saw the coloured divine, Rev. Dr. C.
H. Phillips, bishop of the coloured Methodist Episcopal Churches in
Tennessee, North Carolina, Texas and a portion of Arizona and New
Mexico, and his wife preparing to retire for the night. He demanded
that the conductor order them out of the car, but the conductor
refused.
After he entered Kentucky he hunted for an officer at every station
and finally at Hopkinsville Policeman Bryant Baker agreed to
undertake the task of ejecting the Negroes from the car. The train
was held nine minutes while they dressed and repaired to the coloured
compartment.
I have now described two of the three great classes of Negroes: First, the
worthless and idle Negro, often a criminal, comparatively small in numbers
but perniciously evident. Second, the great middle class of Negroes who do
the manual work of the South. Above these, a third class, few in numbers,
but most influential in their race, are the progressive, property-owning
Negroes, who have wholly severed their old intimate ties with the white
people--and who have been getting further and further away from them.
_A White Man's Problem_
It keeps coming to me that this is more a white man's problem than it is a
Negro problem. The white man as well as the black is being tried by fire.
The white man is in full control of the South, politically, socially,
industrially: the Negro, as ex-Governor Northen points out, is his
helpless ward. What will he do with him? Speaking of the education of the
Negro, and in direct reference to the conditions in Atlanta which I have
already described, many men have said to me:
"Think of the large sums that the South has spent and is spending on the
education of the Negro. The Negro does not begin to pay for his education
in taxes."
Neither do the swarming Slavs, Italians, and Poles in our Northern cities.
They pay little in taxes and yet enormous sums are expended in their
improvement. For their benefit? Of course, but chiefly for ours. It is
better to educate men in school than to let them so educate themselves as
to become a menace to society. The present _kind_ of education in the
South may possibly be wrong; but for the protection of society it is as
necessary to train every Negro as it is every white man.
When I saw the crowds of young Negroes being made criminal--through lack
of proper training--I could not help thinking how pitilessly ignorance
finally revenges itself upon that society which neglects or exploits it.
CHAPTER IV
IN THE BLACK BELT: THE NEGRO FARMER
The cotton picking season was drawing to its close when I left for the
black belt of Georgia. So many friends in Atlanta had said:
"The city Negro isn't the real Negro. You must go out on the cotton
plantations in the country; there you'll see the genuine black African in
all his primitive glory."
It is quite true that the typical Negro is a farmer. The great mass of the
race in the South dwells in the country. According to the last census, out
of 8,000,000 Negroes in the Southern states 6,558,173, or 83 per cent.,
lived on the farms or in rural villages. The crowded city life which I
have already described represents not the common condition of the masses
of the Negro race but the newer development which accompanies the growth
of industrial and urban life. In the city the races are forced more
violently together, socially and economically, than in the country,
producing acute crises, but it is in the old agricultural regions where
the Negro is in such masses, where ideas change slowly, and old
institutions persist, that the problem really presents the greatest
difficulties.
There is no better time of year to see the South than November; for then
it wears the smile of abundance. The country I went through--rolling red
hills, or black bottoms, pine-clad in places, with pleasant farm openings
dotted with cabins, often dilapidated but picturesque, and the busy little
towns--wore somehow an air of brisk comfort. The fields were lively with
Negro cotton pickers; I saw bursting loads of the new lint drawn by mules
or oxen, trailing along the country roads; all the gins were puffing
busily; at each station platform cotton bales by scores or hundreds stood
ready for shipment and the towns were cheerful with farmers white and
black, who now had money to spend. The heat of the summer had gone, the
air bore the tang of a brisk autumn coolness. It was a good time of the
year--and everybody seemed to feel it. Many Negroes got on or off at every
station with laughter and snouted good-byes.
_What Is the Black Belt?_
[Illustration: THE BLACK BELT
In the region shaded more than half of the inhabitants are Negroes.]
And so, just at evening, after a really interesting journey, I reached
Hawkinsville, a thriving town of some 3,000 people just south of the
centre of Georgia. Pulaski County, of which Hawkinsville is the seat, with
an ambitious new court-house, is a typical county of the black belt. A
census map which is here reproduced well shows the region of largest
proportionate Negro population, extending from South Carolina through
central Georgia and Alabama to Mississippi. More than half the inhabitants
of all this broad belt, including also the Atlantic coastal counties and
the lower Mississippi Valley (as shaded on the map), are Negroes, chiefly
farm Negroes. There the race question, though perhaps not so immediately
difficult as in cities like Atlanta, is with both white and coloured
people the imminent problem of daily existence. Several times while in
the black belt I was amused at the ardent response of people to whom I
mentioned the fact that I had already seen something of conditions in
Kentucky, Maryland, and Virginia:
"Why, they haven't any Negro problem. They're _North_."
In Maryland, Kentucky, and Texas the problem is a sharp irritant--as it
is, for that matter, in Ohio, in Indianapolis, and on the west side of New
York City--but it is not the life and death question that it is in the
black belt or in the Yazoo delta.
All the country of Central Georgia has been long settled. Pulaski County
was laid out in 1808; and yet the population to-day may be considered
sparse. The entire county has only 8,000 white people, a large proportion
of whom live in the towns of Hawkinsville and Cochran, and 12,000 Negroes,
leaving not inconsiderable areas of forest and uncultivated land which
will some day become immensely valuable.
_A Southern Country Gentleman_
At Hawkinsville I met J. Pope Brown, the leading citizen of the county. In
many ways he is an example of the best type of the new Southerner. In
every way open to him, and with energy, he is devoting himself to the
improvement of his community. For five years he was president of the State
Agricultural Society; he has been a member of the legislature and chairman
of the Georgia Railroad Commission, and he represents all that is best in
the new progressive movement in the South.
One of the unpleasant features of the villages in the South are the poor
hotels. In accounting for this condition I heard a story illustrating the
attitude of the old South toward public accommodations. A number of years
ago, before the death of Robert Toombs, who, as a member of Jefferson
Davis's cabinet was called the "backbone of the confederacy," the spirit
of progress reached the town where Toombs lived. The thing most needed was
a new hotel. The business men got together and subscribed money with
enthusiasm, counting upon Toombs, who was their richest man, for the
largest subscription. But when they finally went to him, he said:
"What do we want of a hotel? When a gentleman comes to town I will
entertain him myself; those who are not gentlemen we don't want!"
That was the old spirit of aristocratic individualism; the town did not
get its hotel.
One of the public enterprises of Mr. Brown at Hawkinsville is a good
hotel; and what is rarer still, North and South, he has made his hotel
building really worthy architecturally.
Mr. Brown took me out to his plantation--a drive of some eight miles. In
common with most of the larger plantation owners, as I found not only in
Georgia, but in other Southern states which I afterward visited, Mr. Brown
makes his home in the city. After a while I came to feel a reasonable
confidence in assuming that almost any prominent merchant, banker, lawyer,
or politician whom I met in the towns owned a plantation in the country.
From a great many stories of the fortunes of families that I heard I
concluded that the movement of white owners from the land to nearby towns
was increasing every year. High prices for cotton and consequent
prosperity seem to have accelerated rather than retarded the movement.
White planters can now afford to live in town where they can have the
comforts and conveniences, where the servant question is not impossibly
difficult, and where there are good schools for the children. Another
potent reason for the movement is the growing fear of the whites, and
especially the women and children, at living alone on great farms where
white neighbours are distant. Statistics show that less crime is committed
in the black belt than in other parts of the South. I found that the fear
was not absent even among these people.
I have a letter from a white man, P. S. George, of Greenwood, Mississippi,
which expresses the country white point of view with singular earnestness:
I live in a country of large plantations; if there are 40,000 people
in that country, at least 30,000 are Negroes, and we never have any
friction between the races. I have been here as a man for twenty
years and I never heard of but one case of attempted assault by a
Negro on a white woman. That Negro was taken out and hanged. I said
that we never had any trouble with Negroes, but it's because we never
take our eyes off the gun. You may wager that I never leave my wife
and daughter at home without a man in the house after ten o'clock at
night--because I am afraid.
As a result of these various influences a traveller in the black belt sees
many plantation houses, even those built in recent years, standing vacant
and forlorn or else occupied by white overseers, who are in many parts of
the South almost as difficult to keep as the Negro tenants.
Thousands of small white farmers, both owners and renters, of course,
remain, but when the leading planters leave the country, these men, too,
grow discontented and get away at the first opportunity. Going to town,
they find ready employment for the whole family in the cotton mill or in
other industries where they make more money and live with a degree of
comfort that they never before imagined possible.
_Story of the Mill People_
Many cotton mills, indeed, employ agents whose business it is to go out
through the country urging the white farmers to come to town and painting
glowing pictures of the possibilities of life there. I have visited a
number of mill neighbourhoods and talked with the operatives. I found the
older men sometimes homesick for free life of the farm. One lanky old
fellow said rather pathetically:
"When it comes to cotton picking time and I know that they are grinding
cane and hunting possums, I jest naturally get lonesome for the country."
But nothing would persuade the women and children to go back to the old
hard life. Hawkinsville has a small cotton mill and just such a community
of white workers around it. Owing to the scarcity of labour, wages in the
mills have been going up rapidly all over the South, during the last two
or three years, furnishing a still more potent attraction for country
people.
All these various tendencies are uniting to produce some very remarkable
conditions in the South. A natural segregation of the races is apparently
taking place. I saw it everywhere I went in the black belt. The white
people were gravitating toward the towns or into white neighbourhoods and
leaving the land, even though still owned by white men, more and more to
the exclusive occupation of Negroes. Many black counties are growing
blacker while not a few white counties are growing whiter.
[Illustration: WHERE WHITE MILL HANDS LIVE IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA]
[Illustration: WHERE SOME OF THE POORER NEGROES LIVE IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA
COMPANION PICTURES
to show that there is comparatively little difference in the material
comfort of the two classes]
Take, for example, Pulaski County, through which I drove that November
morning with Mr. Brown. In 1870 the coloured and white population were
almost exactly equal--about 6,000 for each. In 1880 the Negroes had
increased to 8,225 while the whites showed a loss. By 1890 the towns had
begun to improve and the white population grew by about 700, but the
Negroes increased nearly 2,000. And, finally, here are the figures for
1900: Negroes 11,029; Whites 7,460.
I have not wished to darken our observations with too many statistics, but
this tendency is so remarkable that I wish to set down for comparison the
figures of a "white county" in northern Georgia--Polk County--which is
growing whiter every year.
Negroes Whites
1880 4,147 7,805
1890 4,654 10,289
1900 4,916 12,940
_Driving out Negroes_
One of the most active causes of this movement is downright fear--or race
repulsion expressing itself in fear. White people dislike and fear to live
in dense coloured neighbourhoods, while Negroes are often terrorised in
white neighbourhoods--and not in the South only but in parts of Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, as I shall show when I come to treat of Northern race
conditions. I have accumulated many instances showing how Negroes are
expelled from white neighbourhoods. There is a significant report from
Little Rock, Arkansas:
(_Special to the Georgian._)
Little Rock, Ark., Jan. 1.--Practically every Negro in Evening Shade,
Sharp County, in this state, has left town as the result of threats
which have been made against the Negroes. For several years a small
colony of Negroes has lived just on the outskirts of the town. A
short time ago notices were posted warning the Negroes to leave the
town at once. About the same time Joe Brooks, a Negro who lived with
his family two miles north of town, was called to his door and fired
upon by unknown persons. A load of shot struck the house close by his
side and some of the shot entered his arm. Brooks and his family have
left the country, and practically every member of the Negro colony
has gone. They have abandoned their property or disposed of it for
whatever they could get.
From the New Orleans _Times Democrat_ of March 20, 1907, I cut the
following dispatch showing one method pursued by the whites of Oklahoma:
BLACKS ORDERED OUT
Lawton, Okla., March 20.--"Negroes, beware the cappers. We, the Sixty
Sons of Waurika, demand the Negroes to leave here at once. We mean
Go! Leave in twenty-four hours, or after that your life is
uncertain." These were the words on placards which the eighty Negroes
of the town of Waurika, forty miles south of Lawton, saw posted
conspicuously in a number of public places this morning.
Dispatches from here to-night stated that the whites are in earnest,
and that the Negroes will be killed if they do not leave town.
Not a few students of Southern conditions like John Temple Graves among
the whites and Bishop Turner among the coloured people have argued that
actual physical separation of the races (either by deportation of the
Negroes to Africa or elsewhere, or by giving them certain reservation-like
parts of the South to live in) is the only solution. But here is, in
actuality, a natural segregation going forward in certain parts of the
South, though in a very different way from that recommended by Mr. Graves
and Bishop Turner; for even in the blackest counties the white people own
most of the land, occupy the towns, and dominate everywhere politically,
socially, and industrially.
Mr. Brown's plantation contains about 5,000 acres, of which some 3,500
acres are in cultivation, a beautiful rolling country, well watered, with
here and there clumps of pines, and dotted with the small homes of the
tenantry.
As we drove along the country road we met or passed many Negroes who bowed
with the greatest deference. Some were walking, but many drove horses or
mules and rode not infrequently in top buggies, looking most prosperous,
as indeed, Mr. Brown informed me that they were. He knew them all, and
sometimes stopped to ask them how they were getting along. The outward
relationships between the races in the country seem to me to be smoother
than it is in the city.
Cotton, as in all this country, is almost the exclusive crop. In spite of
the constant preaching of agricultural reformers, like Mr. Brown himself,
hardly enough corn is raised to supply the people with food, and I was
surprised here and elsewhere at seeing so few cattle and hogs. Sheep are
non-existent. In Hawkinsville, though the country round about raises
excellent grass, I saw in front of a supply store bales of hay which had
been shipped in 400 miles--from Tennessee. Enough sugar cane is raised,
mostly in small patches, to supply syrup for domestic uses. At the time of
my visit the Negroes were in the cane-fields with their long knives,
getting in the crop. We saw several little one-horse grinding mills
pressing the juice from the cane, while near at hand, sheltered by a
shanty-like roof, was the great simmering syrup kettle, with an expert
Negro at work stirring and skimming. And always there were Negroes round
about, all the boys and girls with jolly smeared faces--and the older ones
peeling and sucking the fresh cane.
It was a great time of year!
How does the landlord--and a lord he is in a very true sense--manage his
great estate? The same system is in use with slight variations everywhere
in the cotton country and a description of Mr. Brown's methods, with
references here and there to what I have seen or heard elsewhere, will
give an excellent idea of the common procedure.
_A Country of Great Plantations_
The black belt is a country of great plantations, some owners having as
high as 30,000 acres, interspersed with smaller farms owned by the poorer
white families or Negroes. In one way the conditions are similar to those
prevailing in Ireland; great landlords and a poor tenantry or peasantry,
the tenants here being very largely black.
It requires about 100 families, or 600 people, to operate Mr. Brown's
plantation. Of these, 90 per cent. are coloured and 10 per cent. white. I
was much interested in what Mr. Brown said about his Negro tenants, which
varies somewhat from the impression I had in the city of the younger Negro
generation.
"I would much rather have young Negroes for tenants," he said, "because
they work better and seem more disposed to take care of their farms. The
old Negroes ordinarily will shirk--a habit of slavery."
Besides the residence of the overseer and the homes of the tenants there
is on the plantation a supply store owned by Mr. Brown, a blacksmith shop
and a Negro church, which is also used as a school-house. This is, I found
all through the black belt, a common equipment.
Three different methods are pursued by the landlord in getting his land
cultivated. First, the better class of tenants rent the land for cash, a
"standing rent" of some $3 an acre, though in many places in Mississippi
it ranges as high as $6 and $8 an acre. Second, a share-crop rental, in
which the landlord and the tenant divide the cotton and corn produced.
Third, the ordinary wage system; that is, the landlord hires workers at so
much a month and puts in his own crop. All three of these methods are
usually employed on the larger plantations. Mr. Brown rents 2,500 acres
for cash, 400 on shares, and farms 600 himself with wage workers.
All the methods of land measurement are very different here from what they
are in the North. The plantation is irregularly divided up into what are
called one-mule or one-plough farms--just that amount of land which a
family can cultivate with one mule--usually about thirty acres. Some
ambitious tenants will take a two-mule or even a four-mule farm.
_The Negro Tenant_
Most of the tenants, especially the Negroes, are very poor, and wholly
dependent upon the landlord. Many Negro families possess practically
nothing of their own, save their ragged clothing, and a few dollars' worth
of household furniture, cooking utensils and a gun. The landlord must
therefore supply them not only with enough to live on while they are
making their crop, but with the entire farming outfit. Let us say that a
Negro comes in November to rent a one-mule farm from the landlord for the
coming year.
"What have you got?" asks the landlord.
"Noting', boss," he is quite likely to say.
The "boss" furnishes him with a cabin to live in--which goes with the land
rented--a mule, a plough, possibly a one-horse waggon and a few tools.
He is often given a few dollars in cash near Christmas time which
(ordinarily) he immediately spends--wastes. He is then allowed to draw
upon the plantation supply store a regular amount of corn to feed his
mule, and meat, bread, and tobacco, and some clothing for his family. The
cost of the entire outfit and supplies for a year is in the neighbourhood
of $300, upon which the tenant pays interest at from 10 to 30 per cent.
from the time of signing the contract in November, although most of the
supplies are not taken out until the next summer. Besides this interest
the planter also makes a large profit on all the groceries and other
necessaries furnished by his supply store. Having made his contract the
Negro goes to work with his whole family and keeps at it until the next
fall when the cotton is all picked and ginned. Then he comes in for his
"settlement"--a great time of year. The settlements were going forward
while I was in the black belt. The Negro is credited with the amount of
cotton he brings in and he is charged with all the supplies he has had,
and interest, together with the rent of his thirty acres of land. If the
season has been good and he has been industrious, he will often have a
nice profit in cash, but sometimes he not only does not come out even, but
closes his year of work actually in deeper debt to the landlord.
[Illustration: A "POOR WHITE" FAMILY
"Among them is a spirit of pride and independence which, rightly directed,
would uplift and make them prosperous, but which, misguided and blind, as
it sometimes is, keeps them in poverty."]
[Illustration: A MODEL NEGRO SCHOOL
Inspired by Tuskegee; different, indeed, from the ordinary country Negro
school in the South]
Some Negroes, nowadays usually of the poorer sort, work for wages. They
get from $12 to $15 a month (against $5 to $8 a few years ago) with a
cabin to live in. They are allowed a garden patch, where they can, if they
are industrious and their families help, raise enough vegetables to feed
them comfortably, or part of a bale of cotton, which is their own. But it
is sadly to be commented upon that few Negro tenants, or whites either, as
far as I could see, do anything with their gardens save perhaps to raise a
few collards, peanuts, and peppers--and possibly a few sweet potatoes.
This is due in part to indolence and lack of ambition, and in part to the
steady work required by the planter. The wife and children of an
industrious wage-working Negro nearly always help in the fields, earning
an additional income from chopping cotton in spring and picking the lint
in the fall.
This is the system as it is in theory; but the interest for us lies not in
the plan, but in the actual practice. How does it all work out for good
or for evil, for landlord and for tenant?
Tenantry in the South is a very different thing from what it is in the
North. In the North, a man who rents a farm is nearly as free to do as he
pleases as if he were the owner. But in the South, the present tenant
system is much nearer the condition that prevailed in slavery times than
it is to the present Northern tenant system. This grows naturally out of
slavery; the white man had learned to operate big plantations with
ignorant help; and the Negro on his part had no training for any other
system. The white man was the natural master and the Negro the natural
dependent and a mere Emancipation Proclamation did not at once change the
_spirit_ of the relationship.
To-day a white overseer resides on every large plantation and he or the
owner himself looks after and disciplines the tenants. The tenant is in
debt to him (in some cases reaching a veritable condition of debt slavery
or peonage) and he _must_ see that the crop is made. Hence he watches the
work of every Negro (and indeed that of the white tenants as well) sees
that the land is properly fertilised, and that the dikes (to prevent
washing) are kept up, that the cotton is properly chopped (thinned) and
regularly cultivated. Some of the greater landowners employ assistant
overseers or "riders" who are constantly travelling from farm to farm. On
one plantation I saw four such riders start out one day, each with a rifle
on his saddle. And on a South Carolina plantation I had a glimpse of one
method of discipline. A planter was telling me of his difficulties--how a
spirit of unruliness sometimes swept abroad through a plantation, inspired
by some "bigoty nigger."
"Do you know what I do with such cases?" he said. "Come with me, I'll show
you."
He took me back through his house to the broad porch and reaching up to a
shelf over the door he took down a hickory waggon spoke, as long as my
arm.
"When there's trouble," he said, "I just go down with that and lay one or
two of 'em out. That ends the trouble. We've got to do it; they're like
children and once in a while they simply have to be punished. It's far
better for them to take it this way, from a white man who is their
friend, than to be arrested and taken to court and sent to the
chain-gang."
_Troubles of the Landlord_
Planters told me of all sorts of difficulties they had to meet with their
tenants. One of them, after he had spent a whole evening telling me of the
troubles which confronted any man who tried to work Negroes, summed it all
up with the remark:
"You've just got to make up your mind that you are dealing with children,
and handle them as firmly and kindly as you know how."
He told me how hard it was to get a Negro tenant even in the busy season
to work a full week--and it was often only by withholding the weekly food
allowance that it could be done. Saturday afternoon (or "evening," as they
say in the South) the Negro goes to town or visits his friends. Often he
spends all day Sunday driving about the country and his mule comes back so
worn out that it cannot be used on Monday. There are often furious
religious revivals which break into the work, to say nothing of "frolics"
and fish suppers at which the Negroes often remain all night long. Many of
them are careless with their tools, wasteful of supplies, irresponsible in
their promises. One planter told me how he had built neat fences around
the homes of his Negroes, and fixed up their houses to encourage them in
thrift and give them more comfort, only to have the fences and even parts
of the houses used for firewood.
Toward fall, if the season has been bad, and the crop of cotton is short,
so short that a Negro knows that he will not be able to "pay out" and have
anything left for himself, he will sometimes desert the plantation
entirely, leaving the cotton unpicked and a large debt to the landlord. If
he attempts that, however, he must get entirely away, else the planter
will chase him down and bring him back to his work. Illiterate, without
discipline or training, with little ambition and much indolence, a large
proportion of Negro tenants are looked after and driven like children or
slaves. I say "a large proportion"--but there are thousands of industrious
Negro landowners and tenants who are rapidly getting ahead--as I shall
show in my next chapter.
In this connection it is a noteworthy fact that a considerable number of
the white tenants require almost as much attention as the Negroes, though
they are, of course, treated in an entirely different way. One planter in
Alabama said to me:
"Give me Negroes every time. I wouldn't have a low-down white tenant on my
place. You can get work out of any Negro if you know how to handle him;
but there are some white men who won't work and can't be driven, because
they are white."
_Race Troubles in the Country_
In short, when slavery was abolished it gave place to a sort of feudal
tenantry system which continues widely to-day. And it has worked with
comparative satisfaction, at least to the landlords, until within the last
few years, when the next step in the usual evolution of human
society--industrial and urban development--began seriously to disturb the
feudal equilibrium of the cotton country. It was a curious idea--human
enough--that men should attempt to legislate slaves immediately into
freedom. But nature takes her own methods of freeing slaves; they are
slower than men's ways, but more certain.
The change now going on in the South from the feudal agricultural life to
sharpened modern conditions has brought difficulties for the planter
compared with which all others pale into insignificance. I mean the
scarcity of labour. Industry is competing with agriculture for the limited
supply of Negro workers. Negroes, responding to exactly the same natural
laws that control the white farmers, have been moving cityward, entering
other occupations, migrating west or north--where more money is to be
made. Agricultural wages have therefore gone up and rents, relatively,
have gone down, and had the South not been blessed for several years with
wonderful returns from its monopoly crop, there might have been a more
serious crisis.
_Cry of the South: "More Labour"_
If the South to-day could articulate its chief need, we should hear a
single great shout:
"More labour!"
Out of this struggle for tenants, servants, and workers has grown the
chief complications of the Negro problem--and I am not forgetting race
prejudice, or the crimes against women. Indeed, it has seemed to me that
the chief difficulty in understanding the Negro problem lies in showing
how much of the complication in the South is due to economic readjustments
and how much to instinctive race repulsion or race prejudice.
_A Tenant Stealer_
In one town I visited--not Hawkinsville--I was standing talking with some
gentlemen in the street when I saw a man drive by in a buggy.
"Do you see that man?" they asked me. I nodded.
"Well, he is the greatest tenant-stealer in this country."
I heard a good deal about these "tenant stealers." A whole neighbourhood
will execrate one planter who, to keep his land cultivated, will lure away
his neighbours' Negroes. Sometimes he will offer more wages, sometimes he
will give the tenants better houses to live in, and sometimes he succeeds
by that sheer force of a masterful personality which easily controls an
ignorant tenantry.
I found, moreover, that there was not only a struggle between individual
planters for Negro tenants, but between states and sections. Many of the
old farms in South Carolina and Alabama have been used so long that they
require a steady and heavy annual treatment of fertiliser, with the result
that cotton growing costs more than it does in the rich alluvial lands of
Mississippi, or the newer regions of Arkansas and Texas. The result is
that the planters of the West, being able to pay more wages and give the
tenants better terms, lure away the Negroes of the East. Georgia and other
states have met this competitive disadvantage in the usual way in which
such disadvantages, when first felt but not fully understood, are met, by
counteracting legislation. Georgia has made the most stringent laws to
keep her Negroes on the land. The Georgian code (Section 601) says:
Any person who shall solicit or procure emigrants, or shall attempt
to do so, without first procuring a licence as required by law, shall
be guilty of a misdemeanour.
Ex-Congressman William H. Fleming, one of the ablest statesmen of Georgia,
said:
"Land and other forms of capital cannot spare the Negro and will not give
him up until a substitute is found. His labour is worth millions upon
millions. In Georgia we now make it a crime for anyone to solicit
emigrants without taking out a licence, and then we make the licence as
nearly prohibitive as possible. One of the most dangerous occupations for
any one to follow in this state would be that of an emigrant agent--as
some have found by experience."
In this connection I have an account published in April, 1907, in an
Augusta newspaper of just such a case:
The heaviest fine given in the city court of Richmond County within
the last two years was imposed upon E. F. Arnett yesterday morning.
He was sentenced to pay a fine of one thousand dollars or serve six
months in the county jail.
Arnett was convicted of violating the state emigration laws regarding
the carrying of labour out of the state. He was alleged to have
employed thirteen Negroes to work on the Georgia and Atlantic
Railroad, which operates in this state and Alabama. The jury on the
case returned a verdict of guilty when court convened yesterday,
although it had been reported that a mistrial was probable.
_"Peg Leg" Williams_
A famous railroad emigration agent called "Peg Leg" Williams, who promoted
Negro emigration from Georgia to Mississippi and Texas a few years ago,
was repeatedly prosecuted and finally driven out of business. In a letter
which he wrote some time ago to the Atlanta _Constitution_ he said:
I know of several counties not a hundred miles from Atlanta where
it's more than a man's life is worth to go in to get Negroes to move
to some other state. There are farmers that would not hesitate to
shoot their brother were he to come from Mississippi to get "his
niggers," as he calls them, even though he had no contract with them.
I know personally numbers of Negro men who have moved West and after
accumulating a little, return to get a brother, sister, or an old
father or mother, and they were compelled to return without them,
their lives being imperilled; they had to leave and leave quick.
In view of such a feeling it may be imagined how futile is the talk of the
deportation of the Negro race. What the Southern planter wants to-day is
not fewer Negroes but more Negroes--Negroes who will "keep their place."
_Laws to Make the Negro Work_
Many other laws have been passed in the Southern states which are designed
to keep the Negro on the land, and having him there, to make him work.
The contract law, the abuses of which lead to peonage and debt slavery, is
an excellent example--which I shall discuss more fully in the next
chapter. The criminal laws, the chain-gang system, and the hiring of Negro
convicts to private individuals are all, in one way or another, devices to
keep the Negro at work on farms, in brick-yards and in mines. The vagrancy
laws, not unlike those of the North and excellent in their purpose, are
here sometimes executed with great severity. In Alabama the last
legislature passed a law under which a Negro arrested for vagrancy must
prove that he is not a vagrant. In short, the old rule of law that a man
is innocent until proved guilty is here reversed for the Negro so that the
burden of proving that he is not guilty of vagrancy rests upon him, not
upon the state. The last Alabama legislature also passed a stringent game
law, one argument in its favour being that by preventing the Negro from
pot-hunting it would force him to work more steadily in the cotton fields.
_Race Hatred Versus Economic Necessity_
One of the most significant things I saw in the South--and I saw it
everywhere--was the way in which the white people were torn between their
feeling of race prejudice and their downright economic needs. Hating and
fearing the Negro as a race (though often loving individual Negroes), they
yet want him to work for them; they can't get along without him. In one
impulse a community will rise to mob Negroes or to drive them out of the
country because of Negro crime or Negro vagrancy, or because the Negro is
becoming educated, acquiring property and "getting out of his place"; and
in the next impulse laws are passed or other remarkable measures taken to
keep him at work--because the South can't get along without him. From the
Atlanta _Georgian_ I cut recently a letter which well illustrates the way
in which racial hatred clashes with economic necessity.
TROUBLES OF COUNTRY FOLK
But aren't there two sides to every question? Here we are out here in
the country, right in the midst of hundreds of Negroes, and do you
know, sir, that all this talk about lynching and ku-kluxing is
frightening the farm hands to such an extent we begin to fear that
soon the farmers will sustain a great loss of labour, by their
running away? Already it is beginning to have its effect. After night
the Negroes are afraid to leave their farm to go anywhere on errands
of business. Why, sir, two miles from this town, the Negroes are
afraid to come here to trade at night. The country merchants are
feeling the force of it very sorely, and if this foolishness isn't
stopped their losses in fall trade will be very heavy.
Even some of the ladies of our community are complaining of this
rashness. That it is demoralising the labour in the home department.
So in conclusion, in behalf of my community and other country
communities, I feel it my duty to raise a warning voice against all
such new foolish ku-kluxism.
Mableton, Ga.
T. J. LOWE.
While I was in Georgia a case came up which threw a flood of light upon
the inner complexities of this problem. In the county of Habersham in
North Georgia the population is largely of the type known as "poor
white"--the famous mountain folk who were never slave-owners and many of
whom fought in the Union army during the Civil War. Habersham is one of
the "white counties" which is growing whiter. It has about 2,000 Negroes
and 12,000 whites--many of the latter having come in from the North to
grow peaches and raise sheep. One of the Negroes of Habersham County was
Frank Grant, described by a white neighbour as "a Negro of good character,
a property owner, setting an example of thrift and honesty that ought to
have made his example a benefit to any community."
Grant had saved money from his labour and bought a home. He was such a
good worker that people were willing sometimes to pay him twice the wages
of the average labourer, white or black. On the night of December 16,
1906, the Negro's house was fired into by a party of white men who then
went to the house of his tenant, Henry Scism, also a Negro, and shot
promiscuously around Scism's house, and warned him to leave the country in
one week, threatening him with severe penalties if he did not go. As a
result Grant had to sell out his little home, won after such hard work,
and he and his tenant Scism with their families both fled the county.
"In Grant," said his white neighbour, "the county lost a capable
labourer--in its present situation, a most valuable asset--and a good
citizen."
Here, then, we have race hatred versus economic necessity. The important
citizens and employers of Habersham County came to Atlanta and presented
a petition to Governor Terrell, January 18, 1907, as follows:
TO HIS EXCELLENCY, J. M. TERRELL,
GOVERNOR OF GEORGIA, ATLANTA:
Whereas, on the night of December 16, 1906, parties unknown came to
the quiet home of one Frank Grant, coloured, a citizen of this
county, and shot into his residence, and then went to the home of
Henry Scism, coloured, a tenant of said Frank Grant, and shot
promiscuously around his (the said Scism's) house, and demanded of
him to leave the county under severe penalty.
This has caused the tenant, Henry Scism, to leave, and Frank Grant to
sell his little house at a sacrifice and leave. It comes to us that
Frank Grant is a quiet, innocent, hard-working citizen. Therefore,
we, the undersigned officers and citizens of Habersham County,
Georgia, pray you to offer a liberal reward for the arrest and
conviction or these unknown parties--say $100 for the first and $50
for each succeeding one.
(Signed) C. W. GRANT,
_County School Commissioner_.
J. A. ERWIN CLERK, S. C.,
M. FRANKLIN, Ordinary
J. D. HILL, T. C. H. C.
But, of course, nothing could be done that would keep the Negroes on the
land under such conditions.
_Why Negroes Are Driven Out_
What does it all mean? Listen to the explanation given by a prominent
white man of Habersham County--not to me--but to the Atlanta _Georgian_,
where it was published:
"It is not a problem of Negro labour, because there is little of that kind
there. The white labour will not work for the fruit growers at prices they
can afford, even when it is a good fruit year. Often they decline to work
at any price. They have many admirable qualities; among them is a spirit
of pride and independence, which, rightly directed, would uplift and make
them prosperous, but which misguided and blind, as it sometimes is, keeps
them in poverty and puts the region in which they live at great
disadvantage.
"Landowners and employers, native, and new, are indignant but helpless.
They are in the power of the shiftless element of the whites, who say, 'I
will work or not, as I please, and when I please, and at my own price; and
I will not have Negroes taking my work away from me.' This is not a race
question, pure and simple; it is an industrial question, a labour issue,
not confined to one part of the country."
Here, it will be observed, the same complaint is made against the "poor
white" as against the Negro--that he is shiftless and that he won't work
even for high wages.
Generally speaking, the race hatred in the South comes chiefly from the
poorer class of whites who either own land which they work themselves or
are tenant farmers in competition with Negroes and from politicians who
seek to win the votes of this class of white men. The larger landowners
and employers of labour, while they do not love the Negro, want him to
work and work steadily, and will do almost anything to keep him on the
land--so long as he is a faithful, obedient, unambitious worker. When he
becomes prosperous, or educated, or owns land, many white people no longer
"have any use for him" and turn upon him with hostility, but the best type
of the Southern white men is not only glad to see the Negro become a
prosperous and independent farmer but will do much to help him.
_Vivid Illustration of Race Feeling_
I have had innumerable illustrations of the extremes to which race feeling
reaches among a certain class of Southerners. In a letter to the Atlanta
_Constitution_, November 5, 1906, a writer who signs himself Mark Johnson,
says:
The only use we have for the Negro is as a labourer. It is only as
such that we need him; it is only as such that we can use him. If the
North wants to take him and educate him we will bid him godspeed and
contribute to his education if schools are located on the other side
of the line.
And here are extracts from a remarkable letter from a Southern white
working man signing himself Forrest Pope and published in the Atlanta
_Georgian_, October 22, 1906:
When the skilled negro appears and begins to elbow the white man in
the struggle for existence, don't you know the white man rebels and
won't have it so? If you don't it won't take you long to find it out;
just go out and ask a few of them, those who tell you the whole
truth, and see what you will find out about it.
_What Is the Negro's Place?_
All the genuine Southern people like the Negro as a servant, and so
long as he remains the hewer of wood and carrier of water, and
remains strictly in what we choose to call his place, everything is
all right, but when ambition, prompted by real education, causes
the Negro to grow restless and he bestir himself to get out of that
servile condition, then there is, or at least there will be, trouble,
sure enough trouble, that all the great editors, parsons and
philosophers can no more check than they can now state the whole
truth and nothing but the truth, about this all-absorbing,
far-reaching miserable race question. There are those among Southern
editors and other public men who have been shouting into the ears of
the North for twenty-five years that education would solve the Negro
question; there is not an honest, fearless, thinking man in the South
but who knows that to be a bare-faced lie. Take a young Negro of
little more than ordinary intelligence, even, get hold of him in
time, train him thoroughly as to books, and finish him up with a good
industrial education, send him out into the South with ever so good
intentions both on the part of his benefactor and himself, send him
to take my work away from me and I will kill him.
[Illustration: COMPANION PICTURES
Old and new cabins for Negro tenants on the Brown plantation]
The writer says in another part of this remarkable letter, giving as it
does a glimpse of the bare bones of the economic struggle for existence:
I am, I believe, a typical Southern white workingman of the skilled
variety, and I'll tell the whole world, including Drs. Abbott and
Eliot, that I don't want any educated property-owning Negro around
me. The Negro would be desirable to me for what I could get out of
him in the way of labour that I don't want to have to perform myself,
and I have no other uses for him.
_Who Will Do the Dirty Work?_
One illustration more and I am through. I met at Montgomery, Alabama, a
lawyer named Gustav Frederick Mertins. We were discussing the "problem,"
and Mr. Mertins finally made a striking remark, not at all expressing the
view that I heard from some of the strongest citizens of Montgomery, but
excellently voicing the position of many Southerners.
"It's a question," he said, "who will do the dirty work. In this country
the white man won't: the Negro must. There's got to be a mudsill
somewhere. If you educate the Negroes they won't stay where they belong;
and you must consider them as a race, because if you let a few rise it
makes the others discontented."
Mr. Mertins presented me with a copy of his novel called "The Storm
Signal," in which he further develops the idea (p. 342):
The Negro is the mudsill of the social and industrial South to-day.
Upon his labour in the field, in the forest, and in the mine, the
whole structure rests. Slip the mudsill out and the system must be
reorganised.... Educate him and he quits the field. Instruct him in
the trades and sciences and he enters into active competition with
the white man in what are called the higher planes of life. That
competition brings on friction, and that friction in the end means
the Negroe's undoing.
Is not this mudsill stirring to-day, and is not that the deep reason for
many of the troubles in the South--and in the North as well, where the
Negro has appeared in large numbers? The friction of competition has
arrived, and despite the demand for justice by many of the best class of
the Southern whites, the struggle is certainly of growing intensity.
And out of this economic struggle of whites and blacks grows an ethical
struggle far more significant. It is the struggle of the white man with
himself. How shall he, who is supreme in the South as in the North, treat
the Negro? That is the _real_ struggle!
CHAPTER V
RACE RELATIONSHIPS IN THE SOUTH
I
Generally speaking, the sharpest race prejudice in the South is exhibited
by the poorer class of white people, whether farmers, artisans, or
unskilled workers, who come into active competition with the Negroes, or
from politicians who are seeking the votes of this class of people. It is
this element which has driven the Negroes out of more than one community
in the South and it commonly forms the lynching mobs. A similar antagonism
of the working classes exists in the North wherever the Negro has appeared
in large numbers--as I shall show when I come to write of the treatment of
the Northern Negro.
On the other hand, the larger landowners and employers of the South, and
all professional and business men who hire servants, while they dislike
and fear the Negro as a race (though often loving and protecting
individual Negroes), want the black man to work for them. More than that,
they _must have him_: for he has a practical monopoly on labour in the
South. White men of the employing class will do almost anything to keep
the Negro on the land and his wife in the kitchen--so long as they are
obedient and unambitious workers.
_"Good" and "Bad" Landlords_
But I had not been very long in the black belt before I began to see that
the large planters--the big employers of labour--often pursued very
different methods in dealing with the Negro. In the feudal middle ages
there were good and bad barons; so in the South to-day there are "good"
and "bad" landlords (for lack of a better designation) and every gradation
between them.
The good landlord, generally speaking, is the one who knows by inheritance
how a feudal system should be operated. In other words, he is the old
slave-owner or his descendant, who not only feels the ancient
responsibility of slavery times, but believes that the good treatment of
tenants, as a policy, will produce better results than harshness and
force.
The bad landlord represents the degeneration of the feudal system: he is
in farming to make all he can out of it this year and next, without
reference to human life.
I have already told something of J. Pope Brown's plantation near
Hawkinsville. On the November day, when we drove out through it, I was
impressed with the fact that nearly all the houses used by the Negro
tenants were new, and much superior to the old log cabins built either
before or after the war, some of which I saw still standing, vacant and
dilapidated, in various parts of the plantation. I asked the reason why he
had built new houses:
"Well," he answered, "I find I can keep a better class of tenants, if the
accommodations are good."
_Liquor and "the Resulting Trouble"_
Mr. Brown has other methods for keeping the tenantry on his plantation
satisfied. Every year he gives a barbecue and "frolic" for his Negroes,
with music and speaking and plenty to eat. A big watermelon patch is also
a feature of the plantation, and during all the year the tenants are
looked after, not only to see that the work is properly done, but in more
intimate and sympathetic ways. On one trip through the plantation we
stopped in front of a Negro cabin. Inside lay a Negro boy close to death
from a bullet wound in the head. He had been at a Negro party a few nights
before where there was liquor. Someone had overturned the lamp: shooting
began, and the young fellow was taken out for dead. Such accidents or
crimes are all too familiar in the plantation country. Although Pulaski
County, Georgia, prohibits the sale or purchase of liquor (most of the
South, indeed, is prohibition in its sentiment), the Negroes are able from
time to time to get jugs of liquor--and, as one Southerner put it to me,
"enjoy the resulting trouble."
The boy's father came out of the field and told us with real eloquence of
sorrow of the patient's condition.
"Las' night," he said, "we done thought he was a-crossin' de ribbah."
Mr. Brown had already sent the doctor out from the city; he now made
arrangements to transport the boy to a hospital in Macon where he could be
properly treated.
_Use of Cocaine Among Negroes_
As I have said before, the white landlord who really tries to treat his
Negroes well, often has a hard time of it. Many of those (not all) he
deals with are densely ignorant, irresponsible, indolent--and often
rendered more careless from knowing that the white man must have labour.
Many of them will not keep up the fences, or take care of their tools, or
pick the cotton even after it is ready, without steady attention. A
prominent Mississippi planter gave me an illustration of one of the
troubles he just then had to meet. An eighteen-year-old Negro left his
plantation to work in a railroad camp. There he learned to use cocaine,
and when he came back to the plantation he taught the habit to a dozen of
the best Negroes there, to their complete ruin. The planter had the entire
crowd arrested, searched for cocaine and kept in jail until the habit was
broken. Then he prosecuted the white druggist who sold the cocaine.
Some Southern planters, to prevent the Negroes from leaving, have built
churches for them, and in one instance I heard of a school-house as well.
Another point of the utmost importance--for it strikes at the selfish
interest of the landlord--lies in the treatment of the Negro, who, by
industry or ability, can "get ahead." A good landlord not only places no
obstacles in the way of such tenants, but takes a real pride in their
successes. Mr. Brown said:
"If a tenant sees that other Negroes on the same plantation have been able
to save money and get land of their own, it tends to make them more
industrious. It pays the planter to treat his tenants well."
_Negro with $1,000 in the Bank_
The result is that a number of Mr. Brown's tenants have bought and own
good farms near the greater plantation. The plantation, indeed, becomes a
sort of central sun around which revolves like planets the lesser life of
the Negro landowner. Mr. Brown told me with no little pride of the
successes of several Negroes. We met one farmer driving to town in a top
buggy with a Negro school-teacher. His name was Robert Polhill--a good
type of the self-respecting, vigorous, industrious Negro. Afterward we
visited his farm. He had an excellent house with four rooms. In front
there were vines and decorative "chicken-corn"; a fence surrounded the
place and it was really in good repair. Inside the house everything was
scrupulously neat, from the clean rag rugs to the huge post beds with
their gay coverlets. The wife evidently had some Indian blood in her
veins; she could read and write, but Polhill himself was a full black
Negro, intelligent, but illiterate. The children, and there were a lot of
them, are growing up practically without opportunity for education because
the school held in the Negro church is not only very poor, but it is in
session only a short time every year. Near the house was a one-horse
syrup-mill then in operation, grinding cane brought in by neighbouring
farmers--white as well as black--the whites thus patronising the
enterprise of their energetic Negro neighbour.
"I first noticed Polhill when he began work on the plantation," said Mr.
Brown, "because he was the only Negro on the place whom I could depend
upon to stop hog-cracks in the fences."
His history is the common history of the Negro farmer who "gets ahead."
Starting as a wages' hand, he worked hard and steadily, saving enough
finally to buy a mule--the Negro's first purchase; then he rented land,
and by hard work and close calculating made money steadily. With his first
$75 he started out to see the world, travelling by railroad to Florida,
and finally back home again. The "moving about" instinct is strong in all
Negroes--sometimes to their destruction. Then he bought 100 acres of land
on credit and having good crops, paid for it in six or seven years. Now he
has a comfortable home, he is out of debt, and has money in the bank, a
painted house, a top buggy and a cabinet organ! These are the values of
his property:
His farm is worth $2,000
Two mules 300
Horse 150
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